Being an iOS device owner is somewhat a bitter experience. On one hand, you have Apple’s design and the manufacturer’s cutting-edge premium products which no-one seems to have matched in terms of aesthetics and usability. And on the other hand, the iOS software that powers the device, which has some glaring inadequacies that I just can’t seem to fathom why Apple hasn’t resolved them.
With that in mind, it always gives us great pleasure when a new tweak hits the Cydia store that has been developed to resolve one of these issues. One of the latest tweaks to be born into the jailbreak world is OneByOne Contacts, a package that comes from an idea by Ariel Aouizerate and brought to reality with the coding skills of theiostream. When installed, OneByOne Contacts affords the user the ability to delete entries from the native Contacts app by simply swiping on the desired cell and then selecting ‘Delete’.
In a stock installation of iOS, users are required to delete contacts by entering into the individual entry, selecting edit, scrolling down to the bottom of the screen and then selecting the big red delete option. Not exactly a seamless or time effective experience. This process causes even further confusion when you consider the fact that the majority of other table view instances within the OS have the ability to swipe to delete a row or cell.
After installation, OneByOne Contacts doesn’t append the home screen with any additional icons, but does come with its own preferences bundle through the native Settings app. Unfortunately, one of those configurable options is not the ability to toggle the tweak on or off, but thankfully that is the only downside of the tweak. Users will have the ability to decide whether or not the deletion of an entry should be confirmed, and whether or not the edit button should be active.
Swiping the contacts entry produces the very familiar ‘Delete’ button on the right hand side of the table view cell, and a single tap sends the contact into deletion heaven, without having to go through the laborious process of entering into each contact one by one. OneByOne Contacts is what I would describe as a seamless third-party integration of a feature, which I hope Apple adds as a native feature in the future revisions of iOS.
The tweak is available as a free of charge download from the BigBoss repository with no iOS version requirements being stated.
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