We’ve said it before, and we’re not afraid to say it again and if required, once more. Notification Center is quite possibly one of the most important additions to iOS since multitasking and, ironically, it’s also one of the most underused aspects of Apple’s latest release.
See, Apple seems to have realized how useful Notification Center widgets can be, and they’ve even bundled iOS 5 with two of their own – Stocks and Weather. They’re great, but they serve only to remind us of what Apple is denying us by not opening Notification Center up to iOS developers.
As is always, and I mean always the case, the jailbreak community is filling the space left by Apple’s own desire to cripple its own Notification Center.
One of the latest tweaks to appear on our radar is WeeSearch, a jailbreak tweak that adds search capabilities to Notification Center.
Usage doesn’t get much simpler, really. Tap the search bar and enter the text you want to search for. Choose from between Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, and away you go.
Unfortunately, we’ve heard some concerning reports about more than a few bugs.
For starters, it appears WeeSearch doesn’t support spaces in queries. That means that, for example, you can’t search for ‘Redmond Pie’ but if you use "RedmondPie," you’re golden. It’s not a deal breaker, but it is something that is worth remembering when you are using this particular tweak.
Another slight irritation is the lack of any way to quickly clear the last search term. Usually when there is a text box in iOS, there is also a little ‘x’ which clears any previously entered text. That isn’t the case here, so you’re going to become intimately acquainted with your backspace button!
Slight niggles aside, WeeSearch does pretty much what it says on the tin and it is worth remembering that this is a version 1.0 product. The niggles above can easily be fixed in an update.
You can download WeeSearch right now from Cydia under the BigBoss repo, and it is currently free. Obviously, you’ll be needing a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5 or later in order to take advantage of this particular tweak.
For jailbreaking iOS 5 tethered using Redsn0w, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here, or here if you want to use Sn0wbreeze on Windows. Since jailbreak on iOS 5 is currently limited to tethered boot only, you can install ‘SemiTether’ patch (instructions here) from Cydia to make your jailbreak semi-tethered on iOS 5.
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