While Apple may bring us a revamped lock screen for iPhone, there already exists a fair amount of tweaks available for customizing the lock screen. Among all the tweaks in Cydia, LockInfo is my personal favorite. Recently, the developer has rolled out an update version (i.e. 2.0) of LockInfo and adds more invaluable features.
LockInfo is designed to work on jailbroken iPhone only. Instead of just displaying a wallpaper, LockInifo lets you customize your iPhone’s lock screen to display useful information (e.g. miss calls, to do items, weather forecast).
The version 2.0 release adds a number of features including:
- Added push notification support
- Added email previews with the option to delete
- Added ability to mark emails, SMSs and notifications as read from the lockscreen
- Added manual refresh for mail, weather and twitter
- Added privacy settings to hide email subjects/previews and SMS text
- Added adjustable font sizes
- Many performance and stability improvements
- Fixed disappearing lockscreen/homescreen issue
- Added ability for icons and homescreen to share the same SpringBoard page
To use LockInfo, simply launch cydia and search for “LockInfo” to install it. The app is now available for US$4.99 but it offers a 14-days free trial. Once installed, you can go to Settings and tap on LockInfo. If you’re using a trial license, you can just tap “Continue trial”.
Normally, the LockInfo app is enabled by default. But if you find the “Lockscreen” switch is disabled, flip it to ON to enable LockInfo. Now, you should be able to see a revamped lock screen.
By default, LockInfo only shows mail, miss calls, SMS, next few events pulled from your calendar and push notifications. The app, however, lets you add more features and customization via its plugin architecture. In the LockInfo setting, you can tap on “Get More Plugins” to access all available plugins. Say, you’re a regular user of Twitter, there is a Twitter plugin that automatically retrieves the most up-to-date tweets from your Twitter account. You can also find:
- Clock plugin – Adds a native clock and expandable calendar to the lock screen
- Appigo Todo plugin – Supports Todo and TodoLite to pull your to-do items to the lock screen
- WeatherIcon plugin – Adds live weather information to the lock screen
The app also allows you to reorder the plugin. Simply tap “Plugin Order” and drag the items to rearrange the display order.
Other than the plugins, the LockInfo settings provides numerous customizations including enable scrolling, changing font size, etc. If you really find LockInfo useful, you can even enable LockInfo on home screen that will be shown as an extra page.
Even with the release of iPhone OS 3.1.2, the lock screen remains the same as that of OS 1.0. If you’re looking for additional customizations of lock screen, LockInfo will be the app for you.
What do you think about LockInfo? As always, leave us comment to share your thought.
