Put An Andoid-Like App Drawer Under Your Dock With ‘Vinculum’
One of the common modifications a lot of people like to do with a jailbroken iPhone is to change the look and feel of the dock. A person can remove or change the background blur, increase the amount of icons or even completely get rid it. Vinculum, by developer William Vabrinskas, adds a whole new dimension of functionality to the dock by tucking an Android-like app drawer neatly underneath it just a quick swipe away.
Within Vinculum there are a lot of options including hiding the grabber, changing the size of icons, and using a dark background which also changes your dock background. You can also set it to automatically activate search after swiping up, this makes it just like Spotlight and could replace it for some users. As with most jailbreak tweaks, users can customize the experience to suit their needs.
Vinculum was created to fulfill a request on Reddit and was initially going to be known by a different name, but was rejected due to possible copyright infringement:
“Well after Nexus was rejected for copyright infringement I looked up synonyms for Nexus and Vinculum was one of the ones that came up. I chose it for two reasons, it sounded cool, and it’s definition. Vinculum means “a connecting band of tissue, such as that attaching a flexor tendon to the bone of a finger or toe”. To me this was perfect because I was “stitching” together Android and iOS. I created somewhat of an organic connection between the two with this tweak so I thought it was fitting.
The idea for the tweak was actually a request on r/jailbreak”
With this tweak also comes the additional functionality of hiding apps from the springboard. This sort of goes hand in hand with the tweaks true use-case, by hiding most of your apps it makes you to look in your drawer for apps that you’ve hidden.
Hiding apps is easy, just press and hold on any icon like you would when moving apps and a little ‘hide’ button appears on the bottom right of the icons. To bring it back just head on over into Vinculum’s preference pane and re-enable the app you just hid. In addition, I should also add that hiding apps only hides them on the SpringBoard and not in the drawer itself.
I have been testing this tweak for William since he was calling it DockDrawer. It has came a long way in terms of stability and functionality while remaining true to it’s original intent. I haven’t fully integrated it into my day to day work flows, but it’s really nice to have tucked away when I need it, and I love that it provides a dark background blur for my dock.
Vinculum is $0.99 cents on the ModMyi repo in Cydia, go check it out today if you’d like to hide apps and have more functionality in your dock.
Josh also runs JailCast, a podcast dedicated to the world of jailbreaking that does regular in-depth episodes. You can back and support Jailcast over Patreon and via PayPal.