Cydia Tweak: Broken Home Button? Go Virtual With SPTouch
If you’re the kind of iDevice user who has the self-restraint to hold onto an iPhone for more than a year, it could be that one part or other of your smartphone croaks before you get chance to upgrade. More often than not, the oft-used Home or Lock buttons are the first to go, but if this has happened to you, fret not. Because one new jailbreak tweak can add “a virtual Home button” to a jailbroken iOS 7-powered iDevice.
Called SPTouch, the package can be downloaded free of charge in the Cydia Store. Once installed, you’ll notice that a small square (of a similar shape to the pre-Touch ID Home button icon) appears on the mid-right-hand side of your iDevice’s screen.
Touching this icon effectively acts as a press of the physical Home button, and in this respect the jailbreak tweak works a lot like Apple’s Assistive Touch feature. As a reminder, you can configure Assistive Touch from within the Settings app’s Accessibility preferences pane, and it’s built right into the mobile OS itself.
SPTouch, however, goes a couple of steps further in several different ways. You can double-tap SPTouch’s on-screen button to activate the app switcher, for example, and a long press will lock the iDevice in question. You can also enable or disable the jailbreak tweak from within SPTouch’s preferences pane.
More advanced options allow users to customize the appearance of their virtual button: two slider toggles can increase or decrease the size and transparency of SPTouch’s on-screen icon, and a toggle button can reveal or hide the virtual Home button from the Lock screen. Finally, users can choose a color scheme for SPTouch, too; both the icon itself and its border can be altered and adjusted.
If you have an iPhone 5s, a similar jailbreak tweak called Virtual Home allows users to activate their Home button by resting a finger against the handset’s Touch ID sensor. It’s an impressive jailbreak tweak and we like it, though the change is a little difficult to get used to, and jailbreakers will likely find that they accidentally activate their Home button when Virtual Home is enabled.
For an on-screen touch screen Home button, SPTouch is a jailbreak tweak that’s worth checking out. Best of all, SPTouch can be downloaded in the Cydia Store free of charge, and as of this writing, it’s optimized for iOS 7 only.
Support for earlier iterations of Apple’s iOS is said to be incoming.
Check out SPTouch now, or for more of our recent news, see: T-Mobile Begins Offering Payment Cards, On “1984” Anniversary, Apple Debuts Shortened Versions Of “Your Verse” iPad Air TV Ad, and Twitterrific Update Adds Timeline Streaming, List Management And More.
