[Review] Transparency - Home Screen Icon Appearance Options

[Anthony Bouchard]

While the stock look of iOS’s application icons will cut it for most people, there is surely someone out there who wants to change the look of something about it. Whether you want to go full blown like the screenshot above, or you want to customize each individual feature about an application icon’s appearance, a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Transparency by iOS developer Mr. Russian will help you get on the right track.

The screenshot above may be just a little overkill, but due to the abundance of preferences in the Settings application for adjusting your application icon appearances after installing Transparency, there would be too many screenshots for the combinations of features. Instead, we will show you the preferences pane and tell you what each option does:



The preferences are as follows:

• Enabled – enable or disable the tweak on demand
• All Transparent Icons – make the application icons all transparent (the first screenshot)
• No Icon Shadows – removes the background shadow behind the application icons
• No Dock Reflection – removes the application icon reflections under application icons on the dock
• No Date On Calendar – removes the current date from the Calendar application icon
• No Icon Labels – hides the labels for each application icon
• No Dots – removes the paging dots and spotlight icon from between the dock and last row of applications
• No Badges – hides all application badges
• No Ghostly Icons – keeps applications from becoming transparent when activating the App Switcher

After enabling something from the preferences pane of Transparency in the Settings application, you will need to tap on the Apply button at the top right of the screen and then respring to apply the changes to your home screen. At first, when you are experimenting with the tweak to see what it does, this may seem cumbersome. However, after you have figured out what everything does and you find out which settings you like the best, you won’t have to respring for this purpose anymore.

Transparency definitely isn’t a ‘need to have’ tweak and if you like iOS just how it is, then you probably won't find a use for it. It’s just one of those nice free tweaks allowing you to add a little flavor to your home screen outside of Apple’s fences. If you want to have more control over the appearance of your home screen, then I can recommend transparency. It is free, so give it a try.

Name: Transparency
Price: FREE
Version: 1.0-1
Requirements: iOS 5
Repo: BigBoss
Developer: Mr. Russian
Editor's Rating: / 3.5/5

Sources: Mr. Russian

[DisneyRicky]

Totally useless tweak is totally useless.

[chad2ss]

Totally useless tweak is totally useless.

Ummm then don't use it.

[celeron]

It looks more like a glitch than a tweak itself lol

[theroyalwe]

The amount of utter crap in the cydia store.. It's going to have to be cleaned out at some point I hope like they cleared the fart apps from the app store. I know cydia's about freedom to do what one wants but really? All these tweaks recently are just complete ****..

[Mrteacup]

I agree it's useless unless you like your wallpaper a lot (pr0n)

I just get mad these things get to the news section-.-

[Norb]

I was gonna say this is a April fools joke, but they post useless jailbreak apps all the time as news.

[mr117]

I dl'd this just to play with it. Upon a respiring, I found myself locked out of my phone (I have a hidden tap to unlock on my lock screen). When I tapped the lockscreen, it took me to my phone dialer (I have StartDialer installed). Not sure which one this tweak wasn't playing nice with, but I sure was locked out (except for making a phone call, of course). SBSettings>Safemode>Cydia>Uninstall and back to normal. Thankfully I have SBSettings available on the lock screen with a simple swipe of the status bar, or I would have been up the creek. I might have been able to go in via Cyberduck and remove the tweak, but Safemode is sure a lot easier. Just FYI.

[csglinux]

Totally useless tweak is totally useless.

I guess it is April 1st?!?

[bigliquid530]

It's always nice to have options

[jaxx8028]

This comes in handy for dbar themes