One of the fun aspects of jailbreaking your iOS device is the ability to modify the animations you normally see when you perform actions.
One of the latest to catch my eye is a freebie dubbed NCPop for changing the animation you see when launching Notification Center, which we’ll be showing you in this review.
A better Notification Center animation
What you usually see when you drag down on Notification Center is a plain-Jane sheet-over-sheet dragging animation. There’s really nothing to it, and it’s very flat, but it is smooth.
With NCPop, you will be giving the animation a much more three-dimensional look. Because it’s hard to explain, we’ll just let this animated GIF do the talking instead:
As you can see, the app in the background just sort of slips further into the back space while Notification Center closes in on the foreground.
Overall, the core Notification Center animation is very much the same as it was before; the after effect mostly deals with the app behind it rather than Notification Center itself.
It’s important to note that the animation only takes place in apps, so if you’re opening Notification Center from the Home screen or Lock screen, don’t expect to see any fancy animations.
An aesthetic you can modify
Indeed, this animation can actually be modified to your liking. NCPop adds a preferences pane to the Settings app so you can configure those options to your liking:
What you can do here is enable or disable the tweak on demand, adjust the scale percent, adjust the pull-down percent, and adjust the fade percent.
- Scale Percent: This deals with how much the app interface in back of Notification Center will shrink and grow as you pull down Notification Center from the top of the display. This is the scale effect; 10 is the default, but you can choose a value from 0-100.
- Pull-Down Percent: This deals with the percentage of Notification Center pull-down you’ll have to accomplish before the scaling setting fully maxes out. For example, putting this slider to 50% means that the full scaling will take effect by the time you pull Notification Center down half-way. Once again, you can choose a 0-100 amount.
- Fade Percent: This deals with how much the app behind Notification Center will fade. Depending on the app you’re using this tweak in, you may want to fade the app quite a bit for Notification Center readability purposes. Other purposes deal totally with aesthetic. Just like the others, you can pick between a 0-100 figure.
All settings are performed on the fly, so there’s no need to respring after making changes.
Wrapping up
NCPop is a cool new way to refresh that aging animation that you see when opening Notification Center. The 3D effects are appealing to look at and make opening the interface more fun.
If you’re interested in giving this jailbreak tweak a try, head over to Cydia’s BigBoss repository right now to grab it.
What are your thoughts on this animation over the stock one? Share below!