[Review] Put Display Brightness Buttons On Your Home Screen With SBBrightnessButtons

[Anthony Bouchard]

This tweak will offer you an easier solution to adjusting your screen brightness.

Brightness. It's easily one of the things about iOS that simply annoys us at times. We struggle to find a way to decrease or increase our brightness as it gets light or dark around us. It's a pet peeve for a good number of iOS users. Today, a new jailbreak tweak is available dubbed SBBrightnessButtons by iOS developer Cykey that lets you adjust your screen brightness right from your home screen with buttons that are placed where the page dots are. You can see a demonstration of its appearance in the image above. The '+' and '-' buttons are the controls for the screen brightness.

The buttons being on the home screen can be both good and bad. The bad thing about it is that if you're on the lock screen or in an application, then finding a way to decrease your screen brightness will continue to be a pain in the rear until you either leave the application that you're in or you unlock your iDevice. The good news is, if you're at your home screen then it's substantially faster than using any kind of SBSettings or IntelliScreenX switches which are hidden and can only be brought up with some kind of gesture.

SBBrightnessButtons is a tweak that has been modified from abart997's SBVolume tweak which is basically the same thing except that the buttons control your volume instead of brightness. Credit should be shared among the developers. It can be easy to inadvertently tap on one of the buttons while trying to launch an application or inadvertently tapping on an application while trying to tap on one of the buttons. That is something to look out for.

After you install it, there are no settings to configure. It is what it is. The only icons added to the home screen are those two buttons for adjusting the brightness, however no application icons are added. I don't really care the for the fact that they are in your face when you are launching and closing applications - you will see what I mean when you try it. It doesn't seem to massage itself into the iOS animations very well. The only selling point on this tweak might be the functionality. I don't think that it is very visually attractive on the home screen the way that it sits. SBBrightnessButtons is free in Cydia and will work on any iOS 4 or iOS 5 device that is jailbroken. I can only recommend this tweak to people who are desperate for an easy way to adjust screen brightness. Other than that, I think toggles are much more appealing to the iOS atmosphere.

Name: SBBrightnessButtons
Price: FREE
Version: 0.0.1-1
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: Cykey
Editor's Rating:  3/5

What are your thoughts about SBBrightnessButtons? Share in the comments.

Sources: Cykey

[Selwin Snape]

Could be useful. Maybe a little annoying sometimes, but overall, could be useful.

[KraXik]

Edit.

[LearningMan]

Buggy. Buggy. Buggy. Almost every app I loaded after installing this caused a re-spring at app's exit. Had to go. It has good promise though, if it ever gets right.

[parellax]

Yep, I would NOT recommending installing this app until it sees a lot more bug fixes and/or updates... Unless you have a sudden desire to derive pleasure from seeing your iDevice springing into Safe Mode every time you Home-button in an application.

[the phiLL]

Buggy as hell. And my jailbroken iPhone4 freezes whenever it reaches the main screen, so I can't do anything with it now. What a pain in the *** to re-JB now. This is the price I pay for trying to be more lazy and having brighten buttons on the home screen.

[Brad1279]

yeah i get a constant repsring, still alot of bugs, they should have just waited to relese, i had to delete the files with ifunbox so i didn't have to restore.

[broncosi]

my SMS stock app won't load either now. awesome idea though fail on completion

[the phiLL]

umm.. i just tried to re-jb but it left this stupid SBBrighten thing on there so... it's still freezing. How do I go about removing this???

ModMyI, do the responsible thing and mention that this piece of sh*t mod is more harm then good. :-/ dammit.

Edit: For those that accidentally installed this and froze their phone. I used diskaid to go into the root folder then library>mobilesubstrate>dynamiclibraries then located the two SBBrightness files one is the .plist and the other is the .dylib, deleted those files, then resprung my phone. back to normal thank god.

[Tashawn]

SBSettings or ISX Toggles aren't good enough?

[zYxMa]

Guys you better off with "Brightness Activator Action" and set it to swipe left and right on the status bar to adjust the brightness. This is so far the best tweak for adjusting brightness. Instant access and instant action!

Can't live without it and I have to live with an unjailbroken iPhone 4S :/

[tdawg3000]

Sounded nice, but now can't get passed the lock screen without having to reboot and then repeat. Pretty much bricked my phone till I get to my computer.

[carlos6438]

umm.. i just tried to re-jb but it left this stupid SBBrighten thing on there so... it's still freezing. How do I go about removing this???

ModMyI, do the responsible thing and mention that this piece of sh*t mod is more harm then good. :-/ dammit.

Edit: For those that accidentally installed this and froze their phone. I used diskaid to go into the root folder then library>mobilesubstrate>dynamiclibraries then located the two SBBrightness files one is the .plist and the other is the .dylib, deleted those files, then resprung my phone. back to normal thank god.

I used funbox, searched for SBBrightness and deleted anything that said SBBrightness. next i went to cydia and uninstalled... Piece of shyt app....

[BhadKarma]

There's an app called "sbbrightness" no buttons on the end. It's a slider on your homepage looks nice. Better then "sbbrightnessbuttons" in my opinion.

[iZangetsu]

Guys you better off with "Brightness Activator Action" and set it to swipe left and right on the status bar to adjust the brightness. This is so far the best tweak for adjusting brightness. Instant access and instant action!

Exactly!

[Cykey]

I'm really sorry guys about all the issues you are having. Can someone (please) try this new version?

com.cykey.sbbrightnessbuttons_0.0.1-2_iphoneos-arm.deb
It (should) fix the issues...

Best regards,

Cykey

[Chuck1969]

I'm really sorry guys about all the issues you are having. Can someone (please) try this new version?

com.cykey.sbbrightnessbuttons_0.0.1-2_iphoneos-arm.deb
It (should) fix the issues...

Best regards,

Cykey

Messages wouldn't open after the update.

[Sniper488]

My iPhone will not respond to anything now, it will let me slide the lock screen open and that's it, phone locks up. Can't even put it in safe mode. Now I'll have to waste a night of restoring the phone.

[Chuck1969]

I'm really sorry guys about all the issues you are having. Can someone (please) try this new version?

com.cykey.sbbrightnessbuttons_0.0.1-2_iphoneos-arm.deb
It (should) fix the issues...

Best regards,

Cykey

Never mind, will try the deb

[cruid]

I'm really sorry guys about all the issues you are having. Can someone (please) try this new version?

com.cykey.sbbrightnessbuttons_0.0.1-2_iphoneos-arm.deb
It (should) fix the issues...

Best regards,

Cykey

I used funbox to install this .deb file and restarted the iphone the manual way by holding the POWER + HOME buttons for 10seconds. This time it did not freeze until I got the the springboard and clicked the + sign 3 times in a row and it froze again. After I waited 3 minutes while typing this it automatically resprung and started working just fine. I rebooted the phone just now and it seems to be working just fine but now i have "No Service"???