Forgetful people can now combat their inability to remember their iPhone or iPad passcodes with a new free jailbreak tweak called SmallHint.
What this tweak allows you to do is put an inconspicuous hint on your Lock screen, just below the date, that can help jog your memory in the event that you forget your passcode.
Despite how unlikely it is that you’ll forget a simple 4 or 6-digit passcode, iOS lets you have significantly longer passcodes and even alphanumeric passwords to unlock your device.
Personally, I don’t think anyone who uses a simple passcode would ever need this tweak, but perhaps someone with a longer complex alphanumeric password would find it more useful.
After installation, you can visit the SmallHint preferences pane in the Settings app and configure a small grouping of options:
You’ll find a place to enter the passcode hint you want, RGB sliders for changing the color of the text to anything you want it to be, and a toggle switch for hiding or showing calendar event titles.
All configuration is done on the fly, so you don’t need to respring your device any time you make changes.
One thing that grinds my gears a little however is that there’s no indicator for the RGB sliders that shows you what color you’re picking, so you literally have to lock and unlock your device repeatedly while playing with the sliders until you see a color you like.
As an easier alternative to the cumbersome method described above, you can use an online tool like this one to determine the best RGB color for your tastes and then replicate your results with the tweak’s RGB sliders.
Obviously, SmallHint has the potential to reduce the security of your device, so keep this in mind and don’t put any obvious hints on your Lock screen. If you intend to use the tweak, use a hint that’s just subtle enough for only you to understand.
If you want to download SmallHint, you will find it for free in Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak works on all jailbroken iOS 9 devices.