Glances: Supercharge Your Control Center
The Control Center has been around for quite sometime, since iOS 7 to be exact, and has gone through some changes throughout it’s life. Glances, a new tweak by developer Tweakwiz (@TweakWiz), puts the Control Center on steroids with inspiration from the Apple Watch, as it lets you quickly access important information with a familiar swipe from the bottom of the screen.
Glances ships with seven views — also called Glances — including Shortcut, Weather, Battery, Calendar, ControlCenter, Music, and Apps. They’re all pretty self explanatory and speak for themselves. Tweakwiz plans to continue supporting the tweak and develop new Glances as well as improvements to the framework itself, potentially opening the API to other developers.
When asked about the development process, TweakWiz says the initial inspiration came from the Apple Watch and then evolved into his idea of the perfect iOS Control Center. He created it as a proof of concept in a day about six months ago and picked it up again recently to make it what it is today.
“The original inspiration for Glances came from the Apple Watch. However, over the course of its development, the idea has been improved upon too much to satisfy the basic criteria of what the Apple Watch defined a glance to be. As it stands now, Glances is my envisionment of the perfect iOS control center, brought to life.”
“I created what was essentially the initial revision of the Glances framework in a day about six months ago, as a kind of proof of concept. Fast forward five months later, and I spent approximately three weeks rewriting the Glances framework to be as dynamic, stable, and fast as possible. I also developed the seven initial glances during this period of time, after which, Glances was released.”
Initially I didn’t think I’d use this tweak, as it seemed like there was too much going on. That said though, after I saw him constantly update it with small improvements and user requested features it got my attention. I had been using a tweak called Decorus which is inspired by the iOS 10 Control Center, however, it was a little buggy and I like the Glances design better.
My current set up is no shortcut bar on top, about half height, and just three Glances: Weather, ControlCenter, and Music. For me this is perfect.
If you’re looking to supercharge your Control Center then head on over to the BigBoss repo in Cydia and check out Glances, it’s $2.99 and well worth the price.