I got home from dinner and as I usually do in the evening, I crack open Cydia and update my sources to see if anything interesting has been released. To my surprise, a new tweak was added to Ryan Petrich’s beta repo, called Riker. Now this tweak is in beta, but still worth checking out if you’re interested in such a tweak.

It’s a very Android-esque tweak and not the first of it’s kind, in a sense. Some others tweaks have been released to mimic the functionality and look of navigation bar on Android, but Riker has a twist in comparison to the other tweaks. Riker will allow you to set activator gestures to the 3 buttons, so they can be whatever you want them to be.

To start off, you have a “back” button, a “home” button, and a “App Switcher” button. But, just hop into Activator and you’ll see a new “Riker” section that will allow you to assign any action to any of those buttons. But, what about the glyphs on the control bar? It wouldn’t make much sense to have a “home” button and for it to compose a new tweet, would it? Well, those glyphs change according to the action that you assign to it, so the glyphs make sense.

There are some downsides to Riker and a big one is that you can’t hide it. Not yet, anyway. I’m sure this is something that will come in a future update. Also, if you try to type on the keyboard with it, it can get in the way when trying to hit any keys on the bottom row and you can accidentally invoke something. It’s not landscape compatible just yet, either. But, again this is just a beta and it’s a great beta at that. I look forward to seeing what Ryan can do with this tweak.

Check out the video below to see it in action:

What do you guys think of Riker?