In all the years I’ve been jailbreaking iPhones and testing jailbreak tweaks, one classic has always stood out to me in particular, and that was Conrad Kramer’s famous Graviboard. Just as the name suggests, this tweak brought real gravitational physics to your handset’s Home screen, causing all your app icons to fall in the direction of gravity.
Albeit released almost nine years ago, Graviboard was one of the coolest reasons to jailbreak an iPhone back in the day. Given the magnitude of the original tweak’s popularity, it’s unsurprising that there have been a few reincarnations since then. One of the most recent remakes to pay a viit to Cydia is Gravity by iOS developer Julio Verne.
In addition to invoking an ounce of nostalgia, Gravity lives up to its hype as an ‘alternative to Graviboard.’ As shown in the screenshot example above, the tweak recreates the same (or similar) gravitational physics you’d expect from the near-decade-old classic.
But as you might come to expect, Gravity is configurable. You’ll find a preference pane in the Settings app where you can customize the tweak to your liking:
Here, you can:
- Toggle the tweak on or off on demand
- Allow the tweak to activate automatically
- Include the Dock icons
- Allow app launches while the tweak is active
- Enable icon rotation (to better simulate a fall)
- Hide the icon labels
- Adjust the fall’s ‘bounciness’
- Adjust the fall’s ‘friction’
- Adjust the fall’s ‘angular resistance’
- Adjust the fall’s ‘fall speed’
- Adjust the gravitational impact on the icons
- Adjust the accelerometer’s update interval
- Adjust the ‘explosive force’
- Move icons by swiping on them
- Configure Activator actions:
- For toggling the effect
- For turning gravity on/off
- For toggling the explosion effect
- Reset all settings to their defaults
There’s obviously a lot of physics involved in developing a tweak of this caliber; that said, it’s nice how the preference pane isn’t overly-complicated in that regard. Using basic terminology like ‘bounciness,’ ‘friction,’ and ‘fall speed’ helps anyone (even those who aren’t physics majors) to understand how they’re configuring Gravity. Of course, trial and error tends to help too.
A quick note, however, is that the accelerometer is used to measure the motion that activates the gravitational effect. You can adjust the update interval of the accelerometer check, but do keep in mind that increasing this interval will negatively impact battery life as the software will tap into the sensor more frequently.
Unlike Graviboard and some of the reincarnates over the years, Gravity is a free download from Julio Verne’s beta repository in Cydia. If you’ve always appreciated these tweaks and never had the dough to cough up for them, then here’s your chance to snag it for free. Gravity works on all jailbroken devices running iOS 7-11 and is open source on the developer’s GitHub repository.
Are you happy to see a tweak like Gravity in this day and age of the jailbreak community? Discuss in the comments section below.