Make your Home Screen 3D
Don't swipe through pages of app icons from screen to screen; use a three-dimensional system with the apps rotating in and out of view.
One of the fun things about jailbreaking your iPhone is that you no longer need to do things the way that Apple wants you to. This applies to icons, docks and the look and feel of the iPhone. However, the changes don't have to stop there. Even the basic method of paging from one sheet of icons to another can be modified.
As well as forcing more apps onto a page, resizing the app icons and coming up with completely new formats, there's also a system tweak that means you can decide the manner of how the app icons move when swiping from page to page. To start with, they don't even have to page sideways, you can have this happen vertically, although that can be confusing initially. Where it gets really outlandish is when the icons are resized as they move, giving the impression of moving towards or away from your viewpoint.
That's only the half of it though. They can be made to spin around, chase each other, stack, condense into a single icon or even fade away to reveal the next page of app icons. This can all be done with just one system tweak, available from the Cydia store. It costs a modest $2.99 (approx £1.90) and you can set it up to move your iPhone's icons around however you wish.
Barrel Paging in three dimensions
- Get the app:
Go to Cydia, click Search and type Barrel. The more letters you type, the more specific the results. Tap on Barrel (a $2.99 app) then tap to buy and install. - Download and install:
Having tapped on Install, the details come up. Tap Confirm to download and install it. Then tap Restart Springboard to reboot and get ready to use. - Customise preferences:
System tweaks don't normally have app icons but this one does. Tap on it or tap the Settings app and scroll down to Barrel and then tap that. - FolderEnhancer fix:
There's a built-in fix to make this feature work with FolderEnhancer, a classic jailbreak tweak. If you have that installed and Barrel doesn't work, switch to On. - Scroll:
Tap on Mode to see the full list of 3D effects. There are 19 to choose from. Tap Pac-Man then exit the app - this makes the icons rotate into each other. - Other options:
The vertical scrolling option may confuse you, while the icon scatter option makes them go everywhere. There are no settings; just select one you like.
The Barrel mode options
Customize how app icons move
- Condense and move:
This option causes all the icons to shuffle together under one while moving to the side. The apps on the next page are doing the same but now expanding. - Spread out:
Icon scatter makes the icons move away from each other, off the screen, while the new page moves from a spread-out view, back towards each other. - Three-dimensional scrolling:
Just like the default Barrel feature scrolling, this alternative makes the pages tilt away from the viewpoint, but one page at a time rather than together. - Zooming out:
With this option the app icons zoom out of the screen towards you, getting bigger but fainter as they go, with the new app page zooming into view underneath.
Working with tweaks
You can combine this system tweak with customised settings that use the app icons in specific locations. Try out a new theme with enlarged icons to really customise your iPhone. It's worth try it with tweaks that create paging inside folders as well.
