Many of Apple’s latest handsets sport OLED display panels, which exhibit higher contrast ratios and deeper black colors when compared with older LCD display panels. If you’re fortunate enough to have a jailbreak on one of these devices, then there’s no doubt that you could take better advantage of your OLED display with the help of a modern jailbreak tweak.
Enter Nighthawk, a new release by iOS developer Dylan Duff that transforms many of iOS’ native blurred-background interfaces into OLED-friendly pitch-black masterpieces.
One of my favorite reasons for having an OLED display at my disposal is that pure black pixels are individually turned off in the panel itself to give you that true black look and feel. An LCD display isn’t capable of doing this, and that’s why a black image on an LCD display spits a significant amount of light into your face.
Given the circumstances, it’s not unheard of for an OLED panel to be slightly more power efficient than its LCD counterpart, especially when paired with an appropriate dark mode and supplementary add-ons like Nighthawk. As you take a gander at the screenshot examples of Nighthawk, you can only imagine how many of your pixels won’t need to be used to show day-to-day information.
Right out of the box, Nighthawk makes the following interfaces more OLED-friendly:
- The Lock screen
- The Home screen
- Notification banners
- Widgets
- Control Center
- Folders
- Alerts
- Now Playing
- Dock
- And more…
Once installed, you’ll find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where you can turn individual features on or off, depending on your needs:
Among the things you can toggle here are:
- The tweak in its entirety
- A blacked-out wallpaper
- Black notifications and widgets
- Black Dock
- Black media player
- Black Control Center
- Black Folders
- Black alerts
It’s worth noting that while Nighthawk is particularly impressive, it works best when paired with a proper dark mode jailbreak tweak such as Eclipse or Noctis12. Additionally, the developer recommends using glyph-centric SnowBoard themes to minimalize the display usage of your Home screen’s app icons.
If you’re ready to enter the abyss on your jailbroken iPhone X, XS, or XS Max, then you can purchase Nighthawk for $1.99 in the Packix repository in Cydia or Sileo. The tweak supports jailbroken handsets running iOS 11 and 12, but for obvious reasons, we can only recommend it on devices equipped with OLED displays.
