[Review] Add A Variety of Unlock Animations to Your iDevice With UnlockFX

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could have a cool animation effect when you unlock your iPhone instead of just the plain old going from locked to the home screen effect? Now you can. The tweak has been dubbed UnlockFX by its developer Filippo Bigarella (icon by iSurenix), the creator of the famous Springtomize 2 jailbreak application. In the video above, you can see all of the different kinds of effects that you can activate for when you unlock your iPhone. UnlockFX is completely compatible with iOS 5 and doesn't add any icons to your home screen, just a settings cell in your Settings application.

Unlock effects offers two categories of effects; simple and complex. Obviously, as indicated by the names of the categories, one holds effects which are more in the simple range (2D), and the other holds effects which are a little more complex (3D) and use more GPU (graphics processing unit) power. Depending on your device type, the animations can be laggy; we recommend using at least an A4 device with this tweak. Within the settings you can choose between these effects, change the effect duration, or choose an image for the custom image animation.


When you install the tweak at first, the tweak will be enabled; you can enable and disable the effects of this tweak at your leisure. The effect that is selected by default is, "none." After you change that effect to something else, you can see the effect immediately without a respring, which is shown by the demonstration video above. The change is quick. If you want to disable the tweak, simply turn off the, "enable" switch in the tweak's settings and you don't even have to uninstall it, just enable it when you want to use it again. I think that's a great feature because you don't have to go through the trouble of reinstalling it if you need it disabled for a short period of time.

UnlockFX works great with the Springtomize 2 animations - such as the old-fashioned television animation that appears when you lock your iPhone. This means that you can have an animation for both locking and unlocking your iPhone, which makes it stand out a lot more from non-jailbroken iPhones. It doesn't seem to drain battery life either.

With the growing popularity of animation tweaks in iOS 5 such as the updated vWallpaper, Motion, and now UnlockFX, this might be a tweak that you want to add to your collection. You will be able to make your iPhone look like something that some of your friends could only wish that they had on their non-jailbroken iPhone. In turn, you might be able to persuade them to jailbreak to get it, which of course helps our developers. I think that UnlockFX shows great potential. Speaking with other people and getting their opinions about it, I think that we all agree that more animations should be added in the future, but for now, the animations that are included are enough. I'm happy with it, it doesn't have any bugs from a glance and it seems to work right with all of my jailbreak tweaks. I say, go for it!

What are your thoughts about UnlockFX? Share in the comments!

Sources: Filippo Bigarella