While iOS 8 lacks the presence of animated wallpapers, GIFPaper8 is a new tweak for jailbroken devices that brings your iPhone wallpaper to life by allowing you to set animated GIF images as your wallpaper.
Normally, you can only set still images as your device’s wallpaper on iOS 8, but with the help of GIFPaper8, users can now use any animated GIF image as the Lock screen or the Home screen wallpaper.
It’s fairly simple to use as you can set a GIF image as your wallpaper directly from Safari. All you have to do is open the webpage containing your favorite GIF image in Safari and tap and hold on it for a menu to appear. You can then choose the ‘Set Wallpaper’ option to make it your new wallpaper.
Compared to its predecessor, the tweak comes with additional new features such as the ability to set GIF images from the Photos app. Once you install it, you can configure it from the tweak’s preference pane.
From there, you can enable or disable the tweak via the kill switch toggle, customize the appearance of the GIF wallpaper by selecting the scaling mode and its animation speed, alpha and blur level as well. There’s also a Seperate and a Combined wallpaper mode. The former allows you to set a particular GIF image for either the Lock screen or the Home screen while the latter options sets it for both.
Other than setting GIF wallpapers from Safari, you can also paste the URL of the image or select it directly from the stock Photos app. The latter is a new feature that wasn’t present in the older versions of the tweak. You can also reset the Settings back to default.
The only complain I have about the tweak is that it doesn’t work smoothly. After setting a GIF image as your wallpaper, you’ll notice a slight glitch when unlocking your device or switching pages on the Home screen.
If you’re interested to give this tweak a try, GIFPaper8 is available for iPhone, iPad or iPod for $1.00 on Cydia’s BigBoss repository. Let us know how it performs on your device in the comments section below.
