Emblem
Description:
Emblem brings OS X-inspired notifications to the iPad. With gorgeous animations and native design, Emblem provides a whole new notification experience.
Dismiss notifications by holding and dragging them off screen. If four or more notifications from the same application appear on screen, they will intuitively stack into one banner, allowing you swipe through to view each notification individually. Emblem also offers a tutorial to help walk you through how each feature of the new system works. Assign the tutorial to an Activator method to launch.
This is my latest project that I've been working on for a while. I worked on it with
@joshmtucker. He is a designer that works mostly on iOS tweaks, some well known ones he designed and worked with the developers on are CallBar and Reveal. Originally the project started from this concept, but changed quite a bit before any work was done on it:
http://joshmtucker.tumblr.com/post/18386026704/growlipadJosh released it on stage at the World Wide Jailbreak Conference (WWJC) yesterday during his talk and we worked with Optimo from thebigboss repo to have Emblem released into Cydia seconds after Josh had introduced it, while he was still on stage.
I also wrote in an interactive tutorial that has Siri walk you through how to use it.
The idea is notifications come down from top right and then stack one on below the other. If however you get more then 3 notifications on screen from the same app they merge into one and you can then scroll through it to see each individual notification.
If in your settings you choose an app to receive notifications as alerts rather then bulletins Emblem will give you an OSX style alert instead, a bulletin that doesn't auto-dismiss and has buttons.
If you leave them alone then they will auto-dismiss after 8 seconds. If you want them gone quicker briefly tap and hold a notification then throw it off screen.
If you have your accessibility settings set to read the notifications then Emblem will respect that and read them to you, in the language your device is setup in.
It is available on the Cydia store now for $1.99
A few technical details.This gets in before the banners UI even knows about the notification and then handles it all itself.
Unlike most other custom notification tweaks this doesn't change the banners but is an API compatible reimplementation of the UI.
For the accessibility stuff I get and use Accessibility's and SpringBoard's localisations.
I also dive into Accessibility's system setting.
If you have it set to read the notifications as it comes in it will know that you have asked it to and read them to you, using the official API's.
It also respects other settings, such as "show preview" (for emails and messages).
The drop down animation starts in the status bar and uses a 3D transform to flip up out of the status bar as it falls down.
When the banners merge it actually creates a new banner places that over the highest banner and then animates the other to that spot as it fades them out.
The banners window is 1 level above the notification centers window level.
The interactive tutorial is just a UIWindow above everything, but below the banners window.
The tutorial uses VSSpeechSynthesiser to give you instructions, which is what both Siri and VoiceControl has used since iOS 3.1 (3GS+).
To tell if you have dismissed the banners doing the tutorial the tutorial part of the tweak actually hooks into the standard part of the tweak.
What do you all think of it?
