When Apple introduced Notification Center in iOS 5, they changed the way most people manage notification on their iOS devices. For the most part, they were right. Unfortunately, Notification Center introduced its own deficiencies and now people are looking for changes once again.
Today, change has finally come in the form of a jailbreak tweak called Abstergo, and we’ve got five free copies for our readers. Keep reading for a full breakdown of the tweak and more information about how you can win a copy.
The problem with push
Abstergo (derived from the Latin word for “to wipe away”) is a new approach to dealing with individual push notifications. Currently with stock iOS, you can either clear an application’s notifications all at once from the Notification Center. If your phone is locked, you have even fewer options. You can get a notification off of your lockscreen only by unlocking the phone, and then all of the other notifications that were there disappear as well. Abstergo fixes all of that and more.
Lockscreen
With Abstergo, when notifications come in on the lockscreen, you can swipe across the body the message to to delete it just like you would an email or text message thread. On the lockscreen, you can also clear all of your notifications at once without having to unlock the phone by pulling the list of messages down to reveal another banner at the top. This banner looks like a regular notification, but swiping the icon from left to right will clear away all of your other notifications.
Notification Center
Like the lockscreen functions, Abstergo lets you delete individual items from your Notification Center. The tweak is smart, and will let you clear calendar alerts from here as well, without allowing you to accidentally remove an actual event from the calendar section. Anything that isn’t affected by the “clear all” button above a given section isn’t affected by Abstergo (unlike some other previous attempts at similar tweaks which allowed you to delete anything and caused problems). From the notification center, you can also add a notification back to the lockscreen with the same tap-and-hold gesture.
Reminders
If you want to keep the message around but don’t want to deal with it right now, you tap and hold the notification can also set a reminder. This isn’t an entry in the Reminders app, but rather a timer that causes the message to reappear as if it were new after a selected amount of time. Even if you clear the notification from Notification Center or lockscreen, Abstergo will remember to re-trigger it.
Even better, you can trigger reminders for text messages and iMessages by tapping and holding on the message itself inside the Messages app. It even works with the popular Messages replacement app BiteSMS. Tapping and holding a received message in one of these apps reveals the regular copy/paste menu, which contains an extra button to create a reminder.
Conclusion
Abstergo has changed the way I personally deal with my push notifications for the better. I don’t know how we managed to make it this long without a tweak like this being developed, and I’m actually surprised Apple hasn’t already put this feature into iOS natively. If you’re tired of the “all-or-nothing” approach that the current push system takes, you should absolutely give this tweak a try.
Abstergo is $1.99 and is available on the BigBoss repo today.
Giveaway (ends 1PM EST, Tuesday 4/23)
Want to win a copy of Abstergo for yourself? We’ve teamed up with the developers to give away five copies to our readers. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Share this post on Twitter with the hashtag #AbstergoSunday
- Comment below with a link to your tweet and your Cydia account number
Make sure your Twitter account isn’t set as private. We won’t be able to verify the tweet if it is.
OR
- Go to https://www.facebook.com/9to5mac and click the “Share” button on this story
- Then comment below with your Facebook name and Cydia account number
Make sure when sharing on Facebook that you set the privacy options for this one story to “Public” so that we can see your name on the list of people who shared it. Otherwise we won’t have a way to verify.
You can find your Cydia account number by opening Cydia, selecting “Manage Account” from the front page, and logging into your Cydia account. When you reach the page with your name and “Installable Purchases,” look at the last line of text on the page. Include that number in your comment here. Don’t worry, no one can do anything nefarious with this number (unless giving you free tweaks is considered nefarious).
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments