Going into your applications to get rid of badges can be cumbersome.
Today we are reviewing BadgeClear, a genius tweak by John Heaton that allows you to get rid of those annoying icon badges that plague all of your social networking apps and other applications that support push notifications. BadgeClear was released a while back but it comes with a very cool update today. As shown in the image above, you can put your iDevice into jiggle mode and tap on the app icon's badge to pull up a window asking you if you'd like to clear the badge. If you say yes, the tweak will clear the badge for you, if you say no, the badge will remain until you actually open the app to see your notification. You can also clear badges from outside of a folder and it will allow you to clear all of the badges from each of the apps inside of that folder. But, that's what this tweak has always done.
So what's new?
The new feature comes in the new version that was released today, version 2.1 which I personally helped John Heaton test. The update allows you to clear badges simply by deleting a notification from iOS 5's Notification Center. If you haven't noticed, originally when you clear a notification from iOS 5's Notification Center, the badge will remain on the application until you actually open the application to see what the notification is for. With the update, if you clear the notification from Notification Center, then the badge will disappear too. I think this is a wonderful addition to BadgeClear.
BadgeClear can be downloaded from the BigBoss repo of Cydia.
Name: BadgeClear
Developer: John Heaton
Price: 99¢
Version: 2.1
Editor's Rating: 5/5
Talking to John Heaton on Skype, I asked him some questions:
Anthony: What gave you the idea to make this tweak? Was there a motivation or story behind it?
John: Apple did (and still does) notifications and badging wrong. This is a small step towards improvement.
Anthony: Are you planning any future updates for BadgeClear?
John: Yeah, totally. Hope to provide some fixes for some annoying exceptions (Skype), make it easier to use, add some user preferences, and of course I'm always open for requests.
Anthony: What other projects are you working on?
John: Some REALLY awesome ones. I've taken over Locktopus and plan to greatly improve it for a 2.0 release. As for new tweaks, one of my favorites is going to be out in a couple of weeks, and it's a geolocation awareness assistance tweak. That's about all I can say for now.
Anthony: What are your 5 favorite Cydia packages or tweaks that you are no responsible for?
John: DietBar, CallBar, Barrel, DisplayRecorder, and RunningIndicator are all pretty fun/essential things that I have on my devices.
And that's the new BadgeClear for you all. It's compatible with iOS 5 and it has that awesome new Notification Center feature. As always, thanks for the good job, John!
Sources: John Heaton
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