Jailbreaking your iPhone is awesome. It would be great if Apple offered a higher level of customization out of the box, but they do not, so we have to jailbreak in order to do cool stuff. It is an unpleasant fact, and one that jailbreakers have had to deal with since the dawn of jailbreaking. Since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we have looked for ways to make our iPhone just a little bit cooler. Sometimes jailbreaking is as much about making the iPhone look cool, as it is about finding time savers and useful functionalities.

Transparency is not at all useful in a time saving or increased functionality sense. It is, however, pretty cool. It is a tweak designed for modifying how the icons on your home screen look and behave and part of its functionality is making your icons transparent. The name may have given that away, but that is not all it does. Transparency is a free mod that allows you to take your icons and mess around with them in a way that would usually require downloading a bunch of Winterboard themes.

Set Up

Setting up the application is easy. Just search for Transparency on Cydia. Make sure you have the BigBoss repo installed on your iPhone (it is one of the default repositories, so you should already have it). Click "install" to load the free tweak on your device, and you will be ready to go.

After you install the tweak, it will make your icons fully transparent, so just be prepared for that after you respring your device. It threw me off for a second. It will not remove the text from the icon names, so you should still be able to find your settings folder to go and tweak the app how you see fit, even if that means making for icons not transparent.

To change the settings for this application, you will need to go to your device’s main settings screen and scroll down to the area right below “Store.” From here, you will be able to play with the different options that this tweak offers.

What Can I Do With This Thing?

Well the obvious thing it does is make your icons transparent. If your device has a beautiful picture you want displayed on your screen and you do not want the ugly icons blocking it, you might make use of this feature.

You can also choose to keep the icons, but get rid of some of the other details about them. For example, you can kill the shadow that appears behind the icons or the reflection that shows with the them in the dock. This allows you to keep your icons, but still take some degree of control over how they look.

If you do not like seeing the date on the calendar icon, you can opt to remove that from the settings screen. Personally, I like having the date there, but if that does not tickle your fancy, you can use Transparency to get rid of it.

My favorite option is to remove the icon labels. I can tell what my apps do based on the image, and I do not need the words below to tell me that the big blue “F” is Facebook or the light blue bird is Twitter. Thankfully, I can get rid of the labels with a simple tap with this tweak.

You can also get rid of dots, badges and ghostly icons with this tweak. Getting rid of badges is useful if you are one of those people who do not upgrade their apps regularly, and cannot stand having that red number on the screen taunting them.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a cool tweak that is designed to give you a little more control over the icons on your iPhone. While it may not do anything groundbreaking, it is nice to take a little more control over an aspect of our iDevices that we take for granted.

What did you think of Transparency? Let us know in the comments!