Ryan Petrich’s Treadmill tweak logs how much scrolling you do

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Have you ever wondered just how much scrolling you do on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? Chances are, you do a whole lot more scrolling than you think.

If you’re rocking a jailbroken device, Ryan Petrich has just released a new free jailbreak tweak called Treadmill via his personal beta repository in Cydia that keeps track of how much scrolling you do, and can show you in real time just how much exercise you’re giving your fingers.

Tracking the amount of scrolling you do

Whether it’s browsing websites, scrolling up and down through the jailbreak tweak releases in Cydia, or scrolling through all the settings your iPhone has to offer in your Settings app, chances are you probably do a lot of scrolling to find information on your iOS devices.

The million-dollar question would be: how much scrolling do you do; is there a way to measure it? The short answer is: yes.

Your device’s display is a few inches tall, and varies depending on the device, so every time you scroll one screen length, you can add that to the distance you’ve scrolled. As you can imagine, the repetitive scrolling can add up pretty quickly in distance.

Using Treadmill to measure the distance you’ve scrolled

Treadmill adds a preferences pane to your device’s Settings app that shows the distance you’ve scrolled in both pixels and yards, just to give you a realistic perspective of just how much scrolling you do. It’s nothing too fancy, but it gets the job done.

treadmill jailbreak tweak scrolling distance review

In our case, we’re using an iPhone 5, and it has a display that is 1,136 pixels tall. With that in mind, when we see a result of 57,480 in the Treadmill preferences pane, we can divide that by the amount of pixels we know the iPhone 5 display to be, and get a result of about 50.6. This tells us that we’ve scrolled almost 50.6 full screen lengths since installing Treadmill.

The conversion to yards that the tweak displays is also very interesting, because this puts into a tangible distance perspective just how much we’ve scrolled. Imagine unrolling 22 yards of toilet paper, and that would be how much screen space you’ve scrolled through to get this result.

My thoughts on Treadmill

Knowing Ryan, Treadmill is meant to be fun and informative; this tweak isn’t necessarily something you need to have, but it’s a very cool proof of concept tweak and it’s something you might check back on every so often just out of curiosity to see how much more you’ve scrolled since the last time you had checked the numbers.

Treadmill is a tweak intended for your entertainment and to give you a better understanding of the amount of distance you travel virtually when you do all the scrolling you do.

Obviously, if you could care less about how far you scroll over time, then Treadmill probably isn’t something you would be interested in installing and checking out, but if you think being able to track something like this would be interesting, then by all means give it a try. Being free, there’s nothing to lose if you decide to uninstall it later on.

A couple of things that I thought were worth mentioning are that despite the tweak always running in the background to keep track of all the scrolling you’re doing, there doesn’t appear to be any noticeable impact on battery life. It also doesn’t appear to cause any additional lagginess to the butter-smooth scrolling experience of iOS we all know and love.

How to get Treadmill

Treadmill is not being hosted in any of Cydia’s default repositories just yet. Instead, it’s available in Ryan Petrich’s beta repository. To add the beta repository, if you don’t already have it, you will need to follow these steps:

Step 1: Launch the Cydia app and go to the “Sources” tab.

Step 2: Tap on the “Edit” button and then tap on the “Add” button.

Step 3: In the text field of the pop-up that appears, type in the following repository URL:

http://rpetri.ch/repo/

ryan petrich beta repository add in cydia

Step 4: Tap on the “Add Source” button and wait for the repository to load into Cydia.

Step 5: Now you should be able to search for and install Treadmill from Cydia – it’s a free download.

Conclusion

Treadmill isn’t some breakthrough new jailbreak tweak, but it’s a fun little project that Ryan Petrich thought would be fun for some people to play with, hence why it’s free in his beta repository and not on a main repository in Cydia. On the other hand, being able to see just how much scrolling you do is kind of a neat little ability to have.

What are your thoughts on Treadmill? Share in the comments!