On any stock installation of iOS, every one of your notification badges are going to be red and contain white-colored text that usually indicates the number of missed notifications in the app. To me, that seems a little boring, and a developer named midey seems to agree, as he’s just released a new free jailbreak tweak called ColorMeBaddge.
With this tweak, you can colorize all of your Home screen’s notification badges in pretty much any way you choose, but the best feature is being able to automatically colorize your notification badges based on the dominant color of the application icon in question.
ColorMeBaddge can do this for both application icons and folder icons, and it includes a variety of algorithms that you can choose from, all of which have a different styling and appearance when compared to one another.
Moreover, the tweak also has additional settings for changing up the color of the text inside of badges, colorizing badges that aren’t typically numeric (such as those with “!” signs in them, which can be colorized differently than the others to attract more attention), and more.
The tweak adds a preferences pane to the Settings app where you can configure the options to your liking:
Separated into sections, you can individually configure settings for individual app icon badges, folder icon badges, special badges, brightness settings, and miscellaneous settings. The inclusive respring button at the bottom of the main preferences pane also gives you a way to save any changes you make.
From the app icon and folder icon badge color settings, the options are pretty much the same, and this is what you’ll be looking at:
You get to pick both a color for the background of the badge, and the text inside of the badge. For the coloring, you can pick a solid color, or you can move forward with one of the pre-set algorithms, which can change the color dynamically based on the qualities of the icon itself.
Some of the different algorithms have different requirements, and this is something to keep in mind. For example, the ColorBadges algorithm requires that you have the ColorBadges jailbreak tweak installed to be used. The Boover, ColorCube, and LEColorPicker algorithm settings don’t require any additional installations and each have their own look and feel.
For the most part, they all look about the same, but they have minor differences in the way that they collect their color data, which can lead to slight aesthetic differences. These differences are hard to notice for everyday users, but performance can be one of the most important reasons to pick one algorithm over another.
The final two cells, brightness settings and miscellaneous settings, allow for even deeper customization:
In the brightness preferences pane, you can change the color space, brightness threshold, and choose color adjustment settings based on the text settings you have set. In the miscellaneous settings, you can choose to apply the tweak to even masked app icons that normally have transparency in their icon design, and you can also override your Notifications settings and show badges on apps where you have badge notifications disabled.
ColorMeBaddge is a pretty cool way to make your Home screen stand out from all of the stock iPhone and iPad users out there. It’s a very minor aesthetic detail, but you’d be surprised how much it can make your jailbroken device appear more tasteful than a stock one off of Apple’s assembly line.
If you’re interested in trying ColorMeBaddge, you can download it for free today from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak works on jailbroken devices running iOS 8 through iOS 10.
Do you like the concept of being able to colorize your Home screen’s app icon badges? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
