Ahh, Slide To Unlock – that most famous of iOS hallmarks. It’s the first thing you see when you pick your device up, and was one of several hundred patents filed by the late Steve Jobs.
It is one of those features within the fruit company’s coveted mobile operating system that will probably never change – and why should it? Sure, it can bounce a couple of times when you try and unlock in a rush (particularly if you use your index finger as opposed to your thumb), but on the whole, it does the job well – revealing an infinite array of icons and content behind it.
Having said that, many people like to customize as much of their device as humanly possible, and thanks to jailbreaks laid on by those wonderful dev teams and programmers, iDevice users can manipulate many features usually imprisoned by the Cupertino outfit’s lock and key. Cydia is the open-source App Store, and holds thousands of tweaks and apps which enable anything from covert internet tethering (MyWi, PDAnet), to full on GUI customization (WinterBoard, of course).
UnlockFX, developed by celebrated tweakster Filippo Biga (of Springtomize fame), adds some pretty cool special effects to the unlock animation. You can rotate, move, flip or skew your LockScreen to unlock, and comes preloaded with over 30 different animations from the more basic one-way rotations to the more complex ones. Additionally, you can select a custom image to be shown when unlocking.
It works on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but requires iOS 5 or higher. This means iPad 2 users cannot currently join the party, nor can its smaller A5 brother – the iPhone 4S. That could all be set to change in the next few days though, with an untethered jailbreak teased by pod2g via Twitter. As we know, devs can hit snags at any time, even if the end seems nigh, so whilst we hope and pray to see all devices jailbroken by the end of next week, patience is key.
UnlockFX – like pretty much every tweak – doesn’t have its own SpringBoard icon, therefore all configuration takes place in Settings. For $1.99 over at the BigBoss repo, it’s well worth it – especially if you want your device to stand out.
Obviously, you’ll need to be jailbroken in order to use it. For jailbreaking iOS 5 untethered, follow our complete step by step instructions posted here to jailbreak iPhone, iPad, iPod touch on iOS 5.0.1 using Redsn0w.
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