Velaris is the Home Screen user experience that all jailbreakers deserve

Apple’s new iOS 14 update is jam-packed with enticing new features that offer a strong argument for upgrading from a jailbroken iOS 13 device. But as veteran jailbreakers will say, it’s generally better to stick with the jailbroken device, even if the firmware isn’t the ‘latest and greatest.’

A newly released jailbreak tweak called Velaris by iOS developer Ben Giannis provides an stout example of why that’s the case. As depicted in the screenshot examples above, Velaris upgrades the iPhone’s Home Screen interface by incorporating alarm, calendar, and weather information in an aesthetically-pleasing manner — in fact, it looks so good that some might even prefer it over iOS 14’s new Home Screen widgets.

Velaris is intelligently integrated at the top of the Home Screen to capture your attention without getting in the way of interacting with app icons, regardless of your setup. Velaris’ comprising elements are also compatible with 3D Touch and Haptic Touch gestures, which offer useful actions such as launching the accompanying app or opening links, among other things.

Velaris comes standard with good looks and smooth animations that look and feel like a native part of the iOS experience. At first glance, we were particularly surprised at how Apple-esque the tweak felt.

Once installed, Velaris adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where users can configure a variety of options:

Here, you can:

  • Toggle Velaris on or off on demand
  • Configure the Velaris greeting style
  • Hide or show weather information in Velaris
  • Configure the Up Next information in Velaris:
    • Show all-day events
    • Show reminders
    • Show alarms
    • Show Birthdays
  • Choose between automatic, white, or black text color
  • Configure custom positioning

When configuring the greeting style, there are a few different settings you toy around with. Those include:

  • Hide or show the greeting on demand
  • Choose a greeting style:
    • Greeting only
    • Greeting with name
    • Weekday
    • Weekday with day number
    • Current time
    • Custom text

As for configuring custom positioning, Velaris offers these options to the end user:

  • Enable and configure a custom Y axis value
  • Enable and configure a custom horizontal padding value
  • Enable and configure a custom horizontal margin value
  • Enable and configure a custom icon offset value
  • Enable moving of icons when editing

The developer provides a handy Respring button at the top right of the primary preference pane for saving changes, and we’d strongly recommend using it when making adjustments to Velaris’ preferences to ensure that they take full effect on your device.

Those interested in giving Velaris a try can purchase the tweak for $1.99 from the Havoc repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak is advertised to work on jailbroken devices running iOS 12.0 and later.

Do you plan to give Velaris a try? Let us know in the comments section below.