Status bar is one of the most useful features of iOS. It allows you to quickly glance at important information, such as the current time, the battery level, phone signal, WiFi strength, and so on. A new jailbreak tweak known as Hera aims to go a step further by adding additional functionality to the Status bar.
The tweak adds shortcuts to each of your Status bar icons and allows you to change their positioning. Before I go into detail about how this tweak works, I should point out that you have to install two other Cydia packages as well, otherwise this tweak won’t work. One is libstatusbar and the other is libobjcipc. For some reasons, these packages have not been marked as a dependency for the tweak.
The first feature offered by Hera is repositioning of the Status bar icons. You can tap and drag your icons in Status bar to change their positioning. The best part is that this is done in real-time. As you drag an icon, it will follow your finger until you release it. In this way, you can quickly re-position the Status bar icons to get the arrangement that you desire.
The second feature of Hera is that you can tap on each of the Status bar icons to perform specific actions. Here’s what each of the icons do when you tap on them:
- Carrier signal: enables or disable AirPlane Mode.
- WiFi: searches for nearby WiFi networks.
- Battery: enables or disables Low Power Mode.
- Clock: displays the Clock app in a popup window.
- Do Not Disturb: toggles it on or off.
- Bluetooth: searches for nearby Bluetooth devices.
- Location Services: enables or disables it.
- Cellular Data: toggles it on or off.
As you can see, these shortcuts allow you to quickly perform common tasks from the Status bar. For instance, you can tap on the WiFi icon to quickly connect to a nearby network without opening the WiFi settings pane. This tweak is definitely a great time-saver when it comes to accessing the common settings of your iPhone.
Hera is a very creative tweak and a unique one. I did however face issues with some of the Status bar icons. For instance, you have to tap several times on the clock to view the Clock app. Similarly, tapping on the Do Not Disturb or rotation lock icons will do nothing.
Considering that Hera is a paid package, it is not polished enough to be worth its price tag. These issues should have been fixed by the developer before the tweak got released on Cydia. As for now, I wouldn’t recommend users to purchase it because it is very unstable and contains a couple of bugs that should be fixed.
Overall, Hera is a very creative tweak with a unique concept that hasn’t been used in any other tweak. It just needs a little more work to iron out all the bugs. The developer has already released a couple of updates for the tweak so I’m hoping that the aforementioned bugs will be fixed in upcoming updates.
As noted earlier, there are a couple of Cydia packages that you have to install to get the tweak to work. It seems that the developer forgot to add these packages as dependencies, so they don’t get installed with the tweak. The first one is libstatusbar and the other is libobjcipc. These two Cydia packages are required for the tweak to function properly. If Hera isn’t working properly even after installing these packages, then you should try installing FlipSwitch.
If you’re interested to give this tweak a try, it is available for $1.00 on Cydia’s BigBoss repo. Make sure to let us know what you think about it once you give it a try.
