Eyeplugs prevents unwanted notification banners from getting in the way

Apple’s banner notification system leaves a lot to be desired, especially since modern banners are so huge when they appear that they cover all kinds of important parts of your apps, such as navigation bar, which is often an essential part of navigating your apps.

Because banner notifications are excessively large, a new free jailbreak tweak called Eyeplugs by the author The Holy Constituency of the Summer Triangle can help prevent them from appearing whenever you’re inside of designated apps, but once you close the app(s), you’ll get a summary of all your missed notifications.

To start, let’s talk about why this tweak is useful.

Imagine you’re in Safari, trying to read a paragraph in an iDB article, and suddenly, someone starts to text message you repeatedly. The banner notifications are getting in the way of your top paragraph, disturbing your reading process:

After installing and configuring Eyeplugs to hide banner notifications in the Safari, you will no longer receive banner notifications as long as you’re in the app. This means you can read your articles peacefully without being bothered. On the other hand, when you close Safari, you’ll get a banner notification on the Home screen that offers a summary of your missed notifications:

This tweak is a great idea, because I can’t tell you the countless times I found myself trying to tap on navigation bar buttons in an app, use controls in a game, or read articles online when all of a sudden someone’s notification banners start to plague my interface and degrade the user experience of the app I’m in.

Honestly, we only have Apple to blame for this.

When they introduced banner notifications in the first place, they did it so we wouldn’t have those annoying alert-style notifications popping up in the middle of the screen and getting in the way. Unfortunately, starting with iOS 7, Apple made their banner notifications even taller, which means they take up more space, and hence they’re obtrusive just like the alert-style notifications that used to always get in the way of things.

Also read: TinyBar puts notification banners on a diet

Now that you see how Eyeplugs works, you can go into the Settings app after installation to configure it:

Here, you will see two main settings: the first lets you designate specific apps that you don’t want to receive banner notifications in; the second lets you enable or disable the summary notification banner that you would normally receive after leaving your designated app(s).

It’s great that you get to pick and choose the apps where the tweak  will be effective, because this allows you to have full control over the way the tweak works.

Eyeplugs blocks all notification banners, and not just Messages app notification banners as demonstrated in our post. It’s also important to note that you won’t even hear notification sounds or feel vibrations when you’re in your designated apps, so you won’t even know you had notifications waiting unless you have the summary option turned on, which is why I recommend leaving this setting turned on.

Overall, I have to say that Eyeplugs does a great job of keeping those obtrusive banner notifications out of my face when I’m trying to enjoy content in specific apps. Those banner notifications will appear normally when you’re on the Home screen, which is a pretty nice touch too.

If you’re interested in trying Eyeplugs, you can download the tweak for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository today. The tweak works with jailbroken iOS 10 devices.

What are your thoughts on Eyeplugs? Share in the comments below.