There are countless jailbreak tweaks in Cydia that let you change the look and feel of your notification banners, but not all of them come with an option to preview your changes after you apply new settings.
If you come across this issue often, then you’re going to love a new free release dubbed NotificationTester by iOS developer D4ni.
This tweak lets you fire off a barrage of test notification banners throughout iOS, effective on the Lock screen and elsewhere in iOS, which lets you see the effects of any notification-based cosmetic tweaks you’ve installed on demand.
This solution is more convenient than asking someone else to send you notifications every 2 minutes when you apply changes to one of your tweaks, especially since people don’t always reply as quickly as you would hope.
NotificationTester’s pseudo-notifications even grab icons from a variety of apps you have installed, so if you have a tweak that takes the app icon color into consideration for its functionality , you will see more diversity with NotificationTester than you would testing yourself with just one app, like so:
NotificationTester adds a preferences pane to the settings app where you can configure a few options:
Among the things you can do here are:
- Launch Lock screen notifications
- Launch normal banner notifications
- Randomize app notifications
- Choose the number of notifications to receive
- Pick customized notification text to appear in each banner
My favorite options here are randomizing the app selection and picking the number of notifications you can invoke at once. These are handy for testing a tweak with a host of notifications from several apps so you can see the results in different instances.
Some tweaks, like ColorBanners 2, already have NotificationTester-like functionality built into them, so this isn’t necessary for every tweak in Cydia. On the other hand, it’s handy to have installed in tandem with tweaks that don’t include this functionality, so if you do any theming on your device whatsoever, this tweak may a great addition to your toolbox.
NotificationTester is a free download from Cydia’s BigBoss repository and works on jailbroken iOS 10 devices.
Have you ever needed to send yourself test notifications before? Let us know in the comments section below.
