[Review] Haven't You Always Wanted to Make Your Application Icons Do Bizarre Things?

 This new tweak animates your SpringBoard.

Sometimes the stock iOS look is too professional and we need to do some fun things to make it feel more personalized. One way that we can do this is with a new jailbreak tweak that has been dubbed Motion by its developers J. Corbett and J. Einbinder. Motion will let you bring your dead and motionless SpringBoard to life. Usually your icons just sit there and are free of any animations except for inertial paged scrolling which technically isn't even an animation, but instead a response to touch. Motion comes with many settings that can make your SpringBoard application icons dance around all over the place as shown above in the screenshot.


The animations occur randomly, but also consecutively. There is a good selection of animations to choose from in the Settings application after installing Motion and you can turn on just one, or all of them, or any combination of them. You can set them to animate consecutively or simultaneously meaning that you can either have all of your icons do the same thing in a pattern or you can mix it all up and have all of your icons doing a different animation. The screenshot above is a simultaneous animation because as you can see not all applications icons are doing the same movement; instead it's a combination of animations. The settings pane in the Settings application for Motion looks like this:

The animations options are pretty extensive for you to choose from, including:

Rotation - Your icons will rotate out of the right-side-up orientation.
Scaling - Your icons will grow larger than their original size.
Skew - Your icons will warp into diagonal shapes.
Flip - Your icons will turn upside-down.
Jump - Your icons will literally bounce in place.
Transparency - Your icons will become slightly see-through and then solid again.
Horizontal Wave - Your icons will move back and forth along a horizontal axis.
Vertical Wave - Your icons will move back and forth along a vertical axis.
Simultaneous - Allow more than one animation instance to occur at once on your SpringBoard.

Motion is meant for entertainment purposes and because of that you might feel that the functionality really has nothing to benefit you with, however on quite the contrary, Motion can add a personal touch to your SpringBoard that you will simply fall in love with. If you're a fan of the Barrel tweak that adds personalized SpringBoard scrolling animations - then this tweak will go along nicely with something like that where you can customize how your SpringBoard behaves. You could even use Motion to prank your friends if you wanted to by turning on animations and making your friend's icons go bonkers right in front of their eyes. You could even consider Motion to be a type of screensaver.

I think that Motion is a good deal for the cheap price tag and I also think that the features, while exotic, are cool and fun to use. Installing Motion will put a settings panel in your Settings application but it won't add any new icons to your SpringBoard. You can enable and disable the animations at any time from the Motion settings. With the ability to mix and match animations, you can mold Motion to work the way you want it by applying just the animations that you want to see on your SpringBoard. I think I have to recommend this tweak because it's unique and fun to use. Go grab it in Cydia today if this sounds like an awesome tweak to you!