Your notification banners are an intimate part of your iOS experience that you use to interact with apps and people on a daily basis. With that being said, wouldn’t it be nice if you could customize some of their features a little bit?
A new free jailbreak tweak called SmartBanners is now available in Cydia’s BigBoss repository free of cost, and will give users a myriad of configuration options to customize the look and behavior of their notification banners. In this piece, we’ll take you through a bit of how the tweak works.
Using SmartBanners to customize iOS notification banners
There isn’t a whole lot you can do to change what a notification banner does; it’s intended to show you a little bit of information when an app wants you to know something just happened, and that’s what it’s going to do. On the other hand, you can still use SmartBanners to change a few of the appearance and behavioral qualities of notification banners.
SmartBanners will add a preferences pane to the Settings app that lets you configure some options related to the way your notification banners look and work:
Going down the list, these are the things SmartBanners will give you to customize:
- Hide the app icon from your banner notifications
- Disable the ability to tap anywhere outside of the notification to dismiss the Quick Reply interface
- Completely disable the Quick Reply feature outright
- Disallow all notification banners from being shown
- Hide the interface of the app or Home screen when a banner notification appears
- Force banner notifications to stay on the screen until they are dismissed manually
A respring button at the bottom of the preferences pane is also included, and it’s necessary to use this button to respring your device when you want to save your changes every time you change the options.
My thoughts on SmartBanners
I personally think the tweak is missing a lot of functionality. There are some nice features like the ability to force manual dismiss of notifications, choosing whether or not you want to use Quick Reply, and hiding the background contents when your main focus is on the notification banner, but it lacks some features that I would like to see in a banner-modifying tweak, such as:
- Configuring the size of the banner
- Choosing how much notification content appears in a banner
- Colorizing notification text in the banner
- Hiding banner notifications when they contain certain words/names in them
I think some of the features like hiding the app icon from the banner and disabling a quicker way to exist Quick Reply are a bit silly, but then again opinion is subjective when it comes to the user.
As a free download from Cydia, you won’t lose anything if you opt to give the tweak a try, so why not?
Wrapping up
SmartBanners is a jailbreak tweak that gives you a little more flexibility over the appearance and behavior of your notification banners. If you’re interested in trying it, you can download it free of cost from Cydia’s BigBoss repository right now.
Also check out: BannerBuddy lets you lower notification banners with Reachability
What are your thoughts on SmartBanners? Share in the comments below!