Nuntius is a new jailbreak tweak available in Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $1.49 with its sights set on those of you who love the Messages app of your iOS device(s), but wish it could do so much more than it does already.
Although biteSMS might be gone for good, Nuntius is a great messages app-enhancing tweak that will give you many of the features you may be nostalgic for. In this review, we’ll take you though some of the features and benefits of using Nuntius on your jailbroken iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.
What Nuntius can do
If you’re in the market to improve your Messages app’s functionality, then Nuntius may be a good place to start.
At the reasonable price of just $1.49, the tweak brings to the table a myriad of useful features, including the following:
- Pinning your conversations in the Messages app so they can’t be removed
- Marking conversations as read or unread for future reference
- Hiding or showing individual conversations for improved privacy
- Switching between sending as SMS or iMessage easily to troubleshoot sending failures
- Loading more messages at once when opening a conversation to improve loading speed
- Hiding your typing indicator from other iMessage users so they don’t know when you’re typing
- Customizing the look and feel of the Messages app user interface, such as colorization
We particularly like the ability to hide when you’re typing, the ability to pin conversations so they’re not deleted by mistake, and the ability to hide any of our conversations we want to from prying eyes.
When you want to pin a conversation, all you do is tap and hold on it in the conversation list view, and you will get the menu that asks if you want to pin or unpin the messages conversation, or if you want to add the message to your hidden messages list.
If you have opted to hide a message conversation by adding it to your hidden list, you can tap and hold on your Messages app’s navigation bar and it’ll toggle between your hidden and unhidden conversation lists.
Of course, the tweak also lets you colorize all kinds of aspects of the Messages app for your own personalized touch, such as the conversation bubbles, the background, the navigation bar, the keyboard, and many more elements of the chatting experience.
Everything the tweak can do can be configured to your own personal liking via the preferences pane, which is added to the Settings app after installing the tweak:
Here, you’ll be able to do any of the following things:
- Enable or disable the tweak on demand
- Enable or disable pinned conversations in the conversation list
- Enable or disable marking conversations as read/unread in the conversation list
- Enable or disable moving between the hidden and un-hidden conversation lists
- Choose custom colors for the Messages app background, any selected cell, sender chat bubbles, message previews, send/receive date text, and unread indicator badges
- Hide or show contact photos throughout the Messages app
- Hide or show chevrons throughout the Messages app
- Hide or show the separators in the conversation list
- Reset all options to their defaults
Our thoughts on Nuntius
Nuntius is a great tweak for any serious Messages app user. Although we can probably go without all the colorization effects, we like the functional aspects of the tweak.
Being able to hide conversations on demand means anyone going through your phone isn’t going to be able to snoop on you, and being able to hide when you’re typing means others don’t have to know when you have something to say back, so it’s a great tweak in terms of privacy.
We also love how the tweak can be used to pin conversations, because this lets you safeguard important conversations from accidental deletion. Sometimes this may happen when you’re totally out of it and think you’re deleting one conversation, but end up deleting another more important one by mistake.
Being able to switch between iMessage and SMS on demand is also a pretty useful feature, especially if you know the iMessage servers are going through some issues and you want to make sure the other person gets your message. Although, if all you want is this one feature alone, you need not purchase this tweak because another tweak called SwitchService will let you do this for free.
Overall, the features seem very utilitarian and useful, so we’ll have to say it’s worth checking out!
Conclusion
To supercharge that Messages app for the sake of having more useful features and greater user interface control, Nuntius is a great option for jailbroken devices. It can be had from Cydia’s BigBoss repository right now for just $1.49.
What are your thoughts on Nuntius? Share in the comments below!