PersonalAssistant: a 7-in-1 tweak that supercharges your Lock screen

PersonalAssistant information on Lock Screen

There comes a time every once in a while where a jailbreak tweak is groundbreaking and has the potential to shake up the entire jailbreak community, and folks, we definitely think a new tweak release in Cydia called PersonalAssistant is one of those tweaks.

In this review, we’ll walk you through this monster of a tweak, which the developer notes has seven tweaks built into one unified interface.

Excited yet? You should be…

PersonalAssistant: the new 7-in-1 tweak you have to see

PersonalAssistant, which is now available in Cydia, is basically a brand new way to observe and digest information about your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

The developer of the tweak, TweakWiz, made sure that PersonalAssistant runs well on not only iOS 9 devices, but iOS 8 devices as well. This means anyone with a recent jailbreak can have a part in this release.

To make a long story short, because that’s the way the world likes things these days, PersonalAssistant is a seven-in-one jailbreak tweak; there are actually seven tweaks built into it, that have been formally named: Horlogium, Forecast, Boltix, Auxilium, Phalanx, Acutus, and Symphonia.

Each of these seven tweaks that are baked into PersonalAssistant are designed to work with a specific part of iOS. But we’ll get more into that later.

Handling PersonalAssistant

From a first glance, this tweak appears to modify the Lock screen with a totally new interface, as you see above, but as you’ll soon learn, this tweak can be applied to various places in iOS, including Notification Center and the two Spotlight interfaces in iOS.

If you’ll be using it on the Lock screen, you’ll be happy to know that you still swipe to the left as usual to unlock your device. If you have a passcode, you’ll still be able to see previews of your information from the Lock screen without needing to enter your passcode.

From the interface, you get to see useful tidbits of information, including:

  • Date & Time
  • Battery information
  • Weather conditions
  • Upcoming reminders
  • Upcoming events
  • Notifications
  • Currently-playing media
  • Recently-used apps

You can tap on each individual item, and it’ll bring up a luscious interface that is focused directly on what you tapped on. For example, here are some of the things that appear when you tap on various things, such as the time, battery information, or a notification:

PersonalAssistant Alarms Battery and Notifications

The time interface lets you set a timer or an alarm right from the Lock screen. The battery interface shows you information about your device’s remaining life, as well as the battery percentage. And lastly, the notification interface shows you information about the notification you tap on, and then provides notification dismissal or app launching options.

Other things you can tap on include the weather and the music mini-player:

PersonalAssistant Weather and Music

As you can see, the weather information is very much like what you would see from the Weather app, and the music player shows you what’s playing and lets you control your music. Keep in mind, this is all still from the Lock screen.

So yeah, there’s a lot involved here, and there are a lot of options to configure to get the tweak running how you’d like it to.

Configuring PersonalAssistant

When you get into the PersonalAssistant preferences pane, it can be slightly intimidating, as there are a lot of sections to configure. In fact, it reminds me in many ways of the Springtomize tweak because of all the sections there are.

PersonalAssistant Preferences pane Options to Configure

From the main preferences pane, you’ll be able to access the configuration for the tweak, as well as information about the makers and contact information.

When you start delving into the configuration for the tweak, you’ll find options like:

  • Enabling or disabling the tweak on demand
  • Picking where the PersonalAssistant interface appears in iOS
  • Enabling or disabling the blur effects
  • Configuring a timer dim
  • Respringing the device to save changes

But just below these options, you’ll find the meat and potatoes of the tweak, which involve configuring the seven sub-tweaks. We’ll go through each of those with you below:

Horlogium

Horlogium is the sub-tweak that handles the clock part of the PersonalAssitant interface.

PersonalAssistant Horlogium Preferences

For Horlogium, you will be able to configure the following options:

  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Switching between standard or military time
  • Choosing a color for the time
  • Hiding or showing the seconds
  • Hiding or showing the alarm/timer
  • Allow pausing or resuming the timer
  • Allow cancelling the timer
  • Show the hour and seconds in the timer
  • Choose the color for the timer
  • Reset the dim effect
  • Use the Home button to close the timer

Forecast

Forecast is the part of the tweak that handles, you guessed it, the weather.

PersonalAssistant Forecast Preferences

For Forecast, you can configure the following options:

  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Choosing your preferred temperature scale
  • Enabling or disabling military time
  • Choosing the weather information color
  • Configuring a weather information refresh rate
  • Resetting the dim effect
  • Enabling or disabling using the Home button to close the interface
  • Enabling or disabling showing an error message when weather refresh fails

Boltix

The Boltix part of the tweak handles the battery information in PersonalAssistant.

PersonalAssistant Boltix Preferences

From the Boltix preferences pane, you get the following options to play with:

  • Enabling or disabling the sub-tweak on demand
  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Choosing a theme color for the Boltix interface
  • Resetting the dim
  • Using the Home button to close the interface

Auxilium

Auxilium is the sub-tweak for PersonalAssistant that handles reminders and events.

PersonalAssistant Auxilium Preferences

The options you can configure for Auxilium include:

  • Enabling or disabling the tweak on demand
  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Choosing a date range for upcoming reminders and events
  • Enabling or disabling privacy mode to keep events secretive
  • Enabling or disabling a stronger color for visibility
  • Enabling or disabling auto-coloring the section
  • Enabling or disabling the ability to collapse the sections
  • Hide the section if there are no upcoming reminders or events
  • Resetting the dim
  • Using the Home button to close the interface

Phalanx

Phalanx is the part of PersonalAssistant that deals with notifications.

PersonalAssistant Phalanx Preferences

For Phalanx, you get all of the following options to configure to your liking:

  • Enabling or disabling the sub-tweak on demand
  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Enabling or disabling privacy mode for notifications
  • Using a stronger color for text visibility
  • Automatically colorize the sections
  • Allowing or disallowing section collapsing
  • Enabling or disabling the Dismiss All button
  • Hiding or showing the ‘No Notifications’ label
  • Resetting the dim
  • Using the Home button to close the interface

Acutus

Acutus is the part of PersonalAssistant that deals with your recently-used and favorite apps.

PersonalAssistant Acutus Preferences

From here, you can configure the following options for Acutus:

  • Enable or disable the tweak on demand
  • Choosing the appearance for the app icons
  • Enabling or disabling using custom apps over recently used ones
  • Selecting the custom apps you want to use

Symphonia

Lastly, we have Symphonia, which is a tweak that handles the music player for PersonalAssistant.

PersonalAssistant Symphonia Preferences

From the Symphonia preferences pane, you are able to configure the following options:

  • Enable or disable the tweak on demand
  • Enabling or disabling the overlay
  • Enabling or disabling quick gestures for music
  • Automatically color the section based on what’s playing
  • Automatically color the overlay
  • Resetting the dim
  • Using the Home button to close the interface

My thoughts on PersonalAssistant

This tweak is a mouthful. It has so many features packed into it, that it was hard to keep this post to a bare minimum of words, but for users, that’s a great thing because it means more bang for your bucks.

I personally love the look of the PersonalAssistant interface on the Lock screen. I like the look of the interface itself more than I do the individual previews that you get when you tap on things, but nevertheless, the individual previews are plenty informative and functional.

The fact that you’re getting all seven of these sub-tweaks in one, and the fact that it works with iOS 8 and iOS 9 devices, leads me to have to say that this is a tweak you will want to check out!

Conclusion

PersonalAssistant may be the last Lock screen modification jailbreak tweak you ever need. If you’re interested in trying it, you can download it from Cydia’s BigBoss repository right now for $4.99.

What are your thoughts on PersonalAsssitant? Share in the comments below!