MiniPlayer Is An Always-On-Top Floating Music Widget For iPhone
Looks like the developers over at the Cydia store are looking to fill the Home screens of all iPhone owners with interactive widgets today. The much-anticipated Velox came out earlier, and a unique (albeit less feature-rich) tweak by the name of MiniPlayer is sure to ‘wow’ a lot of people as well. Apple revamped the iTunes interface in its latest version 11, but the feature that has garnered the most praise is the mini player widget. The widget is great for controlling music if you are using multiple applications simultaneously, or are just too lazy to go to iTunes to merely pause playback. The MiniPlayer tweak brings the same widget to iPhone, letting users keep an eye on their playback even if they are playing a game or using an app on their device. The widget can be hidden when you are not using it, making it perfect for everyday use.
You don’t have to manually configure MiniPlayer, as the widget is ready to be used right after its installation. Having said that, MiniPlayer does have a Settings menu of its own, which houses two pretty useful options. The first option lets you make sure that the widget is only visible while you are listening to music, and the other one deals with toggling the widget on the lock screen.
MiniPlayer has two views. In one mode, it displays the name of the current song and artist, while the playback controls are accessible through the icon in the right corner of the widget. The controls include pause/play, rewind/previous and forward/next. The widget can be dragged to any part of the screen. If you are using an app or just want to temporarily hide MiniPlayer, drag it to the right edge of the screen. The widget doesn’t go away completely, as you can still invoke it later by manually swiping it back towards the middle.
During our somewhat limited test run, we did not notice any considerable lag introduced by MiniPlayer, even when coupled with rather heavy 3D games. The only thing that might annoy you is that the MiniPlayer widget always stays in portrait mode, even when you are using an app in landscape.
Overall, MiniPlayer is pretty great, but some might say that the price of $2 is a little high for a simple widget. If you are already a user of PowerMusic though, the developer has promised that you will get a discount on MiniPlayer, although the tweaks aren’t interdependent. So, if you are interested, grab MiniPlayer from the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store.
