MagicLabels lets you colorize your app and folder labels individually

magiclabels change the color of app icon labels individually

Those of you who are into theming and customizing your iPhones or iPod touches so they look different from everybody else’s may find a new free jailbreak tweak called MagicLabels to be quite useful.

It’ll let you colorize your app and folder icon labels individually to any color you want, which can be tailored to fit any theme you might be using, or to fit your feelings and personality at a specific point in time. In this piece, we’ll take you through how the tweak works.

Using MagicLabels to colorize your iOS icon labels

MagicLabels lets you customize the color of each and every individual app or folder icon label on your Home screen. You can set up a two-tone color scheme, a multi-tone color scheme, or you can set up a completely random array of colors; the choice is completely up to you.

After installation, MagicLabels will add a preferences pane to the Settings app where you can begin configuring the colors of your app and folder icon labels to your liking:

magiclabels preferences pane options to configure

From the first section, you can toggle the entire tweak on or off on demand and choose a base color. The base color works a lot like a default color that will be applied to any app or folder icon labels that you haven’t specifically set a color for. Underneath the base color, you will find that you have eight individual color cells that you can configure. These eight color selections will be applied to any app or folder labels of your choice.

For example, if we open the Color 1 preferences cell, we’ll see a color picker cell, as well as a list of app or folder names that we want colored with our chosen color. In this list, we’ll pick green for the color and apply it to every other app on the Home screen starting with the Messages app, then under the Color 2 preferences cell, we’ll pick red for the color and apply it to every other app on the Home screen starting with Calendar.

This combination will create a checkerboard appearance as you see in our screenshot example, but we can also select a total of 8 different colors and randomize them throughout all the app and folder labels or we can choose just one color and use that one color for all our app and folder labels.

Underneath the main color options, users get the ability to choose a shadow color or a background color. The shadow color provides an iOS 6-like drop shadow behind the letters of your app and folder labels, while the background color option creates a blocky background with the chosen color instead:

magiclabels drop shadow effect

Example of drop shadow

magiclabels background color effect

Example of background color

A Save button is included at the top right of every page from the Magic Labels preferences pane, which you must tap on to save your changes when you have made any. Tapping on the button will produce an immediate respring to save your changes, after which your device should start right back up with the changes you’ve made.

My thoughts on MagicLabels

I’m really no themer, so I can’t really say that MagicLabels is something that I would run on my daily driver, but for anyone who likes to tinker with and customize the appearance of their iPhones, MagicLabels will compliment the experience nicely.

On a positive note, the tweak provides limitless options for choosing colors because the included color picker lets you pick from a color palette instead of choosing colors from a pre-defined list.

A few things to note on the negative side too: MagicLabels seems to produce a slight lag in some of the Home screen animations, likely because the device now has to render drop shadows in addition to custom colors.

Admittedly, the organization of the tweak’s preferences pane is also a bit rough around the edges, but it’ll work fine for anyone who puts in the time to configure the tweak properly. Because of the way the preferences pane is set up, users can only configure up to 8 + 1 different colors for their labels. We say 8 + 1 and not 9 because you can configure 8 colors indefinitely, and the ninth color is your base color, which is applied to any apps or folders that you haven’t manually configured.

Wrapping up

MagicLabels is a free jailbreak tweak you can download from Cydia right now, and it works very well for a free tweak, so if you’d like to get started in colorizing your app and folder labels so you can color-match your favorite themes, head over to Cydia right now.

MagicLabels has only been tested on iOS 9, and not on iPads, so please keep this in mind before downloading.

Will you be using MagicLabels on your jailbroken iOS device? Share in the comments.