View Now Playing Info For The Current Song In iPhone Status Bar
A Cydia tweak does not have to be of the magnitude of SBSettings or Activator to gain popularity among jailbreak users; some tweaks focus on just one feature of iOS, but are very useful in their own regard. NowPlaying on Status Bar is one such tweak offering something that might appear to be really minor at first glance, but has the potential of being useful to many. iOS already has a couple of decent ways of controlling music playback, and there are several music-related Notification Center widgets available for jailbroken devices. However, before you change a track or adjust its volume, it is nice to see its name at one quick glance. You can go to the lock screen to see the song and artist name, but what if you are using an app while listening to music? NowPlaying on Status Bar has been designed specifically for such scenarios; the tweak displays song info on the status bar both within apps and on the SpringBoard.
NowPlaying on Status Bar is available in the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store. It is a free tweak, but you have to be on iOS 6 to use it, as it is not compatible with any older version of iOS (though we can’t think why). Owing to its super-simple functionality, the tweak doesn’t have to be configured at all, and for this reason, it doesn’t even add any Settings app entry of its own upon installation.
This is how it works: whenever music is being played, the time display in the status bar is replaced with the song info. Don’t worry about losing your clock though; the developers have given thought to how important it is to be able to view the current time at quick glance, and that’s why the bar keeps alternating between both time and song info. The displayed song information includes both the track name as well as that of the artist(s). If the name is too long, you might lose the signal bar and battery icons momentarily as well, in addition to the clock.
NowPlaying on Status Bar works with all apps except for those that run in full screen mode. We tried the tweak with podcasts as well, and it showed the info in the status bar just the way it did for songs.
Since the current track’s name is shown on the lock screen by default already, NowPlaying on Status Bar does not work there. The only problem we could find with the tweak was its lack of options, which might have been useful for changing the duration of the info display, or showing only the title name and skipping the artist name. NowPlaying is worth a shot for every jailbroken iDevice owner since it is completely non-intrusive, and doesn’t cost a dime.
