Ever since June 2009, Apple have included the Spotlight search feature on the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. The inclusion of the Spotlight search feature in iOS 3.0 and above allows users the ability to quickly search contacts, mail metadata, calendars, media and installed applications amongst other things.
Long term users of a Mac will no doubt recognize the feature as being first implemented into Mac OS X 10.4 in 2005 after being announced at the 2004 Worldwide Developers Conference. The iOS version is limited in functionality compared to the desktop version, but still serves as a functional search system for the popular mobile range of devices.
Although an extremely useful feature, I know from personal experience that Spotlight is sometimes considered to be a forgotten feature, and is something that I am pretty sure isn’t used to its full potential. I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually used Spotlight to search my device for things.
It seems to be the norm in circumstances such as these, an iOS developer known as ‘coffeejay’ has stepped up to the plate in an attempt to increase the power and functionality of the Spotlight feature. CommandSpot is a new tweak which hooks directly into Spotlight, with the intention of adding full speed, enhanced functionality with added support for native application launches.
CommandSpot allows Spotlight to be thought of a quick launcher, which accepts users commands to perform certain system actions, along with launching native applications. CommandSpot comes with a list of predetermined commands which limit what the user can and can’t do with this tweak, which are listed below:
- Respring – automatically resprings the device Springboard.
- Reboot – automatically reboots the device.
- Turn off – powers down the device.
- Settings – launches the settings application.
- Wifi – launches the wireless internet settings.
- Sms – launch and compose a new SMS.
- Google – launch Safari and load Google hompeage.
- Yahoo – launch Safari and load Yahoo.
- CNN – launch Safari and load CNN.
- Bing – launch Safari and load Bing.
- Fb – launch the official Facebook application.
- FB profile – Launch Facebook application directly to your profile page.
- Tw – launch official Twitter application.
- Tw [user] – launch Twitter application and display a specific users profile.
As you can see, CommandSpot offers quite an in depth array of options as standard. If you are struggling to see what is possible using this tweak, you can also use the command ‘cmd’ with Spotlight and it will launch Safari and provide a list of the available options.
One worthwhile addition in the future would be the ability to users to teach the tweak to add their own commands to perform personalized actions. CommandSpot is a tiny download at only 5.1kb and is available free of charge via the ModMyi repository.
You will obviously need to have jailbroken device to run it. For jailbreaking iOS 5 untethered, follow our complete step by step instructions posted here to jailbreak iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on iOS 5.0.1 using Redsn0w.
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