The infamous notch became a critical element of Apple’s design language when introducing it with the iPhone X. Fast-forward to now, and the notch has infiltrated more devices including the iPad lineup and, more recently, the MacBook Pro lineup.
Despite being on the fence about the notch since it’s introduction in 2017, I’ve long felt that Apple could have done more with its mobile operating systems to better glorify the company’s notch-centric design language.
Agreeing with the aforementioned train of thought appears to be iOS developer ginsudev and designer AVIROK1who’ve just recently collaborated to bring us all a new jailbreak tweak dubbed NotchBanners.
The name of the tweak is appropriate, as it intentionally shrinks incoming notification banners to the width of your handset’s notch to make them appear as if they were an extension of the notch itself when they drop down from the top of the display. An example of how this looks appears in the screenshot above.
It should be stated that NotchBanners makes banner notifications substantially narrower, which means you’ll see less content at a glance. On the other hand, it doesn’t make banner notifications much longer because native banners would already dip as low as they do even after installing NotchBanners. This means NotchBanners won’t impact notification banner intrusiveness.
Once installed, NotchBanners adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where users can configure a few different options to their liking:
Here, users can:
- Toggle NotchBanners on or off on demand
- Select a preferred banner background color
- Select a preferred banner text color
The developer provides an Apply button at the top-right of the preference pane so that users can easily save any changes they make to the options. We like that the tweak defaults to the color black for the notification banners because this blends in best with the notch on handsets with OLED-equipped displays, but the option is always there to change the color if you wish to.
If you’d like to add more purpose to your jailbroken handset’s notch, then you can download the NotchBanners tweak for free from Ginsu’s personal repository via your favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 & 14 devices, and is open source on the developer’s GitHub page.
To get Ginsu’s personal repository in your package manager app if you’re not already using it, merely add the URL provided below:
https://ginsudev.github.io/repo/
Do you think that banner notifications look better or worse with the new NotchBanners tweak? Be sure to let us know your position on the concept in the comments section down below.