This post reviews MiniPlayer, a jailbreak tweak that brings the iTunes 11 MiniPlayer view to your iOS device and lets you control your music from anywhere.
Recently, I published a post on TeachMeiOS describing how to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 7. If you’ve jailbroken your device, you’re likely looking for great tweaks to use on it. This will serve as the first full review of a jailbreak tweak on TeachMeiOS, and I’m very excited to share this one with you. I use this tweak on nearly a daily basis and it recently received a fresh coat of iOS 7 paint. MiniPlayer is truly a wonderful example of how independent developers of jailbreak tweaks can really enhance the user experience of iOS.
Developed by MPow and designed by Surenix, MiniPlayer borrows a concept from iTunes on Mac and Windows computers. It consists of a small music player that hovers in front of your lock screen, home screen, and even open apps. It puts music controls and information, including beautifully rendered album artwork, in front of you at all times.
Design – Surenix is one of my favorite jailbreak tweak designers, and he has brought his beautiful design aesthetic to MiniPlayer for iOS 7. The app truly looks like it belongs on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, utilizing iOS’ new flattened, simplified user interface and including iconography that fits iOS 7 perfectly. MiniPlayer includes both a dark and a light theme. I am partial to the dark theme, which isn’t turned on by default, but I frequently switch back and forth between the two based on the color of my current wallpaper. Switching themes can be accomplished via a toggle in the app’s settings or simply by double tapping anywhere on MiniPlayer itself. The app also includes great animations and beautifully scrolling text. MiniPlayer is definitely a looker.
Features: Perhaps the best place to go to find a feature list for MiniPlayer is the app’s Quick Tips in its settings pane, located with other installed jailbreak tweaks’ settings below the social section in the Settings App. Here, though, is a detailed overview of MiniPlayer’s features.
Firstly, and perhaps obviously, MiniPlayer grants you constant access to music controls and information. Not only does the app integrate with the stock Music App, it also supports pretty much any other app that plays audio including Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and many more. Skip and play/pause buttons are immediately available upon showing the app. MiniPlayer also provides you with the currently playing track’s album art, title, artist, and album and gives you a quick look at the volume level of your device.
Tapping once on the scrolling title switches to a different view, showing the track title, artist, and album title and displaying a progress bar with play time.
In this view, tapping and holding on MiniPlayer brings up an overlay that allows you to access repeat and shuffle controls, as well as a clever share button that lets you share a screenshot of the app via Messages, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
The progress bar view also reveals a magnifying glass search button. Tapping this button will bring up the keyboard and allow you to search your music library, podcasts, and even Spotify. Tapping a track will begin playing it immediately while tapping and holding on a track will actually queue that track up to play after the currently playing song is done.
Tapping on the album artwork in MiniPlayer will bring up a view of the play queue and an Open Music button which will open the Music App.
What if you want to move MiniPlayer out of the way? Simply tap and drag it off to one of the sides of your screen and let go. The app will move out of the way, with only a small “handle” still showing. Tapping or dragging this handle back from the edge of the screen will return MiniPlayer to the center of the screen. Additionally, you can also tap and drag MiniPlayer up and down on the screen if you simply want to take a quick look at what’s behind it. You can also use another jailbreak tweak called Activator, available for free, to assign a guesture to hide MiniPlayer entirely and show it again. On my iPhone, I have swiping from left to right on the status bar assigned as my show/hide gesture.
It’s amazing how many features the developers were able to pack into such a small (mini) space!
Price: Like apps on the App Store, not all jailbreak tweaks in Cydia (the jailbreak app store) are free. You can search for MiniPlayer and purchase it on Cydia for the price of $1.99, well worth it for the great functionality it brings to iOS. The thing that I like about paid jailbreak tweaks is that the developers are compensated for the many hours that they put in to development. Cydia allows you to pay securely using Amazon (which I use) or Paypal.
If you’ve jailbroken your iOS device, give MiniPlayer a try! It’s well worth the money and I predict you’ll use it nearly every day, just like I do. It’s a jailbreak tweak that feels as though it was included in iOS by Apple itself. If you haven’t jailbroken yet but like what you see, check out our 4 part series on jailbreaking (Lesson 1 can be found here) and our recent post on how to jailbreak iOS 7 here.
