There can be no denying that the favored jailbreak flavor of late 2011 and 2012 has to be the iOS 5 exclusive Notification Center and Siri digital assistant. The inclusion of the two new features in the public release of iOS 5 presented practically limitless opportunities for developers when it comes to extending their native limited abilities.
Through a stock iOS 5 installation, Notification Center gives users access to a dedicated screen which displays pushed notifications for active applications as well as interactive widgets which are all accessed through a pull down method from the status bar. The problem with a stock installation of iOS, is that Notification Center only comes with two available widgets which allow the display of location based weather as well a financial ticker.
The Cydia store has been inundated with Notification Center based tweaks since well before iOS 5 was even made public which is largely thanks to developer releases of the operating system. A lot of the NC modifications are simplistic and offer only a small benefit to the user. One of the latest tweaks for NC comes in the form of a modification known as Bulletin.
Bulletin is a commercial tweak from developer Ma Jun and offers users an enhanced Notification Center by allowing NC to be invoked when the lock screen is active, gives the Notification Center a transparent appearance and adds a close button the iOS 5 notification banner which appears at the top of the screen when a notification is received.
Unlike other tweaks which allow additional widgets or plugins to be activated, Bulletin concentrates more on the aesthetic and small functionality side. Some users will definitely appreciate the new ability to access all notifications directly from the lock screen, which is one of the main reasons users are prepared to pay a premium price for tweaks such as IntelliScreenX. Bulletin gives that option allowing NC to be invoked without the additional step of unlocking the device.
There can be no denying that being able to invoke Notification Center from the lock screen will definitely appeal to a lot of iPhone users, but I am not sure if that would be worthy of the $0.99 price tag that is attached to Bulletin. The adding of a close button on notifications banner seems a little unnecessary to me considering the notification dismisses itself very quickly anyway.
Regardless of price, Bulletin works exactly as described and if you have been seeking functionality of this nature you can grab Bulletin now from the Big Boss repository for $0.99.
You will obviously need to jailbreak your device to install this tweak. For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. For those of you with iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
You may also like to check out:
- Top Must-Have iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Jailbreak Tweaks For iOS 5
- Top Must-Have Widgets For iOS 5 Notification Center
- Top Must-Have Jailbreak Tweaks And Apps For Your Jailbroken iPhone 4S
- Enhance Your Newly Jailbroken iPad 2 With These Must-Have iOS 5 Compatible Cydia Tweaks And Apps
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