It seems to be a very popular trend lately for banner notifications to be shrunken down to only Status Bar-sized notifications rather than the full-sized iOS 5 notification banners, which are about as tall as two Status Bars. Recently we have seen DietBulletin by Ryan Petrich and today, another tweak called StatusBulletin by iOS development firm dba Technologies, LCC comes into the light.
StatusBulletin gives credit to DietBulletin as it was a derivative work and gave the developer the idea to make it. The tweak basically shows you your banners in a smaller amount of space to help keep them from being obtrusive; however, it does this differently than DietBulletin because DietBulletin is literally a miniature iOS 5 notification banner, while StatusBulletin gives you the illusion of a Status Bar-based notification. Shown above is an example.
Another useful feature of the tweak is that notifications, when they are too long to show on the screen, actually scroll right to left in the Status Bar so you can read all of it. For text messages, you will see the sender’s name and their message, while for other applications you will see the application name and the notification itself.
StatusBulletin also comes with color choices – the two most easily distinguishable being silver or black. The silver color resembles an actual banner more so than the black color. In fact, the black color sort of reminds us of the unobtrusive Twitter notifications that lurk in the Status Bar while you’re inside of the Twitter application.
All of these choices can be configured from the Settings application under the StatusBulletin preferences pane that appears when you install the free jailbreak tweak. The preferences pane, shown above, gives the user the ability to enable 'Smart Titles' for any applications of their choice. The tweak will take note of all the applications on your device automatically and allow you to turn a switch to the on or off position for each of them to enable and disable this feature for the applications you select. 'Smart Titles' will help you hide unnecessary title information from banners when it's obvious where the notification came from.
The preferences pane also comes with the ability to hide the biteSMS button when you get a notification from biteSMS and the ability to change the style of the banner notification. The banner styles you can choose from include:
- Matching (matches the color of your current Status Bar)
- Inverted (inverts the color of your current Status Bar)
- Black
- Silver
For a free banner tweak, it is pretty impressive in terms of both appearance and functionality. The extra customization options make it worthy of trying for anyone that doesn’t like how large Apple’s stock notification banners are. From all of our testing, the tweak appears to work exactly as expected, so feel free to give it a test run!
Name: StatusBulletin
Price: FREE
Version: 1.0.0-3
Requirements: iOS 5
Repo: ModMyi
Developer: dba Technologies, LLC
Editor's Rating: 4/5
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