Alympus tweak revamps multitasking on jailbroken iOS devices

Famed designer Surenix and developer Kyle Howells have teamed up to create a new iOS task switcher/Control Center replacement called Alympus, which combines a full screen of toggles with a new music controller and a customizable grid layout for running apps.

At the heart of Alympus is the switcher view, which presents your running apps in a 2×2 grid, giving you access to more applications at once than the standard switcher provides. Pinching on this screen allows you to show either more or fewer cards.

Zooming in will allow you to see one app at a time like the regular iOS switcher, while zooming out will allow you to see nine apps at once. Zooming out once more will turn the cards into individual icons, letting you fit 20 apps on the screen at once. Swiping up on one of these apps (even in the icon view) lets you quit it. You can also pull an app toward the bottom of the screen and release it to “slingshot” it out of the switcher—handy for those cards on the top row that are a little harder to swipe up.

However, there’s more than just a switcher here. Alympus also includes a replacement for Control Center. A quick left-to-right swipe on the switcher brings you to the music view, which gives you access to all of your standard playback controls, metadata, and album artwork. You can also find your AirPlay settings here.

Unlike the switcher view, the music screen doesn’t show your wallpaper behind it (unless you’re not playing any music). Instead, it shows a blurred version of the current song’s artwork with a light or dark overlay. The tweak defaults to the light view, but I found that I preferred the design of the darker version. You can switch between the two in the Settings app or by triple-tapping the artwork on the music screen. Double-tapping the artwork will launch the Music app.

Swiping behind the music screen in Alympus brings you to the toggles page, which allows for control of a ton of device settings (including AirDrop and brightness). This is the page that I have the most issues with, design-wise. There’s currently no way to decide which toggles show up here—any installed FlipSwitch addons will be shown here automatically, including those for toggling tweaks like NoSlowAnimations and the standard controls for basic device functions.

While you can’t remove toggles from this screen, you can tap and hold them to rearrange them, making it a little easier to quickly find what you’re looking for. This page also houses your recent contacts if you have that feature enabled in the Mail section of the Settings app.

Like the music screen, the toggle screen can show either your wallpaper or the artwork of the current song with the light or dark overlay.

Bringing up the Alympus interface is as simple as double-clicking the home button by default, but since the tweak uses Activator, you can customize that gesture to anything you want. You can also swipe up from the bottom of the screen to enter the multitasking view. A “continuous swipe” feature means you can swipe up from the bottom to get the multitasking view, then fluidly start moving over to the music and toggle screens without lifting your finger.

The swipe-up gesture can also be customized in the Alympus settings page to perform different actions. If you prefer having access to the standard Control Center, you can use it to bring that up instead of Alympus. There’s also a setting that lets you exit your current app and return to the home screen using the same gesture.

The transitions between screens are smooth throughout the entire tweak, but I ran into one issue a few times where I would swipe toward the music screen as if I was swiping to my second home screen, but end up overshooting it and landing on the toggles page because things were just a bit too fluid.

Aside from a few small issues—the inability to hide toggles and the ability to easily overshoot the music screen—Alympus is a pretty cool tweak for anyone looking for an app switcher replacement. The music and toggle functions eliminate the need for Control Center, freeing up the swipe gesture for a faster way to get to the useful bird’s-eye view of your running apps.

You can download Alympus today for $3.99 on the BigBoss Cydia repo.