The renowned Music application, found on all iOS 5 iDevices, is an awesome way to listen to all of your favorite music. Being that it’s already great, it’s challenging to think of ways to improve it. With a rather new jailbreak tweak dubbed MusicGestures by iOS developer Chris Kant, it’s possible to make that music experience even better.
MusicGestures gets all of its glory by making the Music application a gesture-based Music player. You still have the option to use the buttons if you prefer to, although with this tweak you can perform gestures such as swiping, pinching, or tapping. Not only does it work in the main view of the Music application (front album cover), but it also works in back album cover view. If you aren’t sure what that means, the diagram below shows the distinction between both views:
After installing MusicGestures, you will find a straightforward, but extensive preferences section for it in the Settings application. With these preferences, you can assign the different gestures with their own actions. There are more gestures than there are actions, so you will not use every gesture, however you will probably use every action. Additionally, each of these gestures and actions gets assigned twice – once for the front album cover view and once for the back album cover view. You can mix and match them however you want to and you can assign each action more than once if you like.
The gestures you can use:
- swipe up
- swipe down
- swipe left
- swipe right
- single tap
- double tap
- triple tap
- pinch
The actions you can assign to each gesture:
- disabled (do nothing)
- previous track
- next track
- play or pause
- flip to back album cover view
- exit now playing
- toggle information overlay
While I would personally rather use the buttons that Apple has etched into the Music application’s interface, these gesture-based controls are pretty fun to use. This implementation of iPod controls would be best suited for the Music application if it were a full-screen application and the buttons were not already there and operational. These controls do not work on the lock screen when you are playing a song and they only work with the Apple Music application and with no other kind of music player for iOS.
MusicGestures works with iOS 4 and iOS 5 and runs on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It is an open source project with its source code available here.
Name: MusicGestures
Price: FREE
Version: 1.1
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: Chris Kant
Editor's Rating: 4/5
Sources: Cydia
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