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One of the big draws of jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad is access to SBSettings, a free app that provides quick access to settings like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, screen brightness, and so on.
If you’ve ever wished for that kind of convenience without the hassles of jailbreaking, this is your lucky day. A hack called IconSettings lets you add up to 40 iOS-settings icons to your iDevice, no jailbreaking required.
This “app” is actually a collection of fancy-icon browser bookmarks with hooks into iOS settings. Thus, when you tap, say, Brightness, you’ll see Safari appear and disappear before you actually arrive at the setting. (Similar bits of trickery have been used to add speed-dial icons to your Home screen.)
Installation goes like this: fire up Safari on your phone or tablet, head to iphoneza.co.za/IconSettings/, and scroll down to the Full Icons Packs section. Tap one of the two choices (there’s nothing that identifies the differences between Standard and “Steristumpie”; I chose the former), then follow the prompts. Be prepared to wait a few minutes, as the installation process is slow.
And it leaves you with some 40 icons scattered across your iDevice, which can be a little unsettling. You’ll almost certainly want to pile them into folders, though obviously it might be nice to keep frequently used settings on your Home screen.
You can, of course, delete any settings you don’t want–they’re just bookmarks, after all–but you can also remove the entire thing by deleting the IconSettings profile (via Settings > General > Profiles).
If you’d rather not install the full batch of icons, you can pick and choose the ones you want (just scroll further down the page in Safari, then tap one of the settings links). The only downside to this approach is that when you use the shortcut, it’ll leave a blank page open in Safari. When you go the full-batch route, this doesn’t happen.
I have mixed feelings about IconSettings. The icons themselves are attractive, and they work as advertised–though the by-way-of-Safari delay, brief though it may be, is annoying. Plus, it’s a hassle to have to organize 40 new icons. Too bad the developer couldn’t figure a way to automatically put them in folders.
Your thoughts?
