I’ll be the first to say that I love how notification banners look on the iPhone in a post-iOS 13 era, but I also think there’s room for improvement in both the aesthetics and the functional implementation to make the user experience a bit better from anywhere in the operating system.
While perusing the New tab in my package manager over the weekend, I happened upon a new jailbreak tweak release dubbed Dayn by iOS developers Devvix and JannikCrack, which appears to offer some serious upgrades to the native notification system found in iOS 13. Curious as I was to better understand how it worked, I decided to give it a try.
Right off the bat, you’ll notice that Dayn gives notification banners a new aesthetic that looks particularly good on notched handsets. The rounded corners are carefully crafted to sport the same corner radius as what’s found at the edge of the display, and the inclusion of upgraded profile pictures with an icon denoting the app it’s from is merely icing on the cake.
At first glance, it looks like Dayn merely gives your banner notifications a new look, but there’s definitely a lot more to the tweak than meets the eye. For example, it introduces a new feature called Continuous Notifications, which makes it so that you can view an entire conversation from the notification banner itself instead of having to launch the Messages app to view more context.
If you’re a minimalist, then you’ll be happy to know that Dyan incorporates a tiny banner effect that can be used to shrink the overall size of notification banners. This feature makes it so that banner notifications don’t intrude on your in-app content, which prevents notifications from becoming a hindrance as you use your device.
Once installed, users will find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where they can configure Dayn however they want:
Here, you can:
- Toggle Dayn on or off on demand
- Choose between automatic, dark, light, or black mode
- Customize Dayn’s appearance settings
- Customize Dayn’s font settings settings
- Customize Dayn’s profile picture settings
- Customize Dayn’s tiny banner settings
- Customize Dayn’s miscellaneous settings
Digging deeper, you’ll find the following options for each section:
Appearance
- Enable customizations of the banner notification’s background blur
- Hide or show the banner notification’s grabber
- Adjust the banner notification’s corner radius via a slider
- Adjust the banner notification’s icon corner radius via a slider
- Adjust the banner notification’s icon size via a slider
- Set the time before the banner automatically dismisses (1-8 seconds)
- Adjust the offset from the top of the display (1-6 units)
- Hide or show the Status Bar
- Enable a 24-hour Status Bar clock
- Hide or show buttons in notification banners
- Enable bold button text
Font Settings
- Adjust the maximum number of lines that can display in a notification banner (1-7)
- Adjust the font size of the header in notification banners (12-18 pts)
- Adjust the font size of the notification text in notification banners (10-16 pts)
Profile Pictures
- Enable or disable profile picture displays
- Enable an app icon overlay on the profile picture as none, glyph, or app icon
- Enable profile pictures for notification banners pertaining to:
- WhatsApp Messenger
- Slack
- Discord
- Messages
- Facebook Messenger
Tiny Banner
- Enable or disable tiny notification banners
- Use tiny banners by default only if there’s no text content in the notification banner
- Adjust the font size of the notification text in tiny banners (10-16 pts)
Miscellaneous
- Enable or disable haptic feedback for switches
- Choose whether read receipts are shown (none, on expand, or on reply)
- Invoke a test banner to see what your settings look like
- Reset all settings to their defaults and respring
The developer provides a Respring button at the top-right of the primary preference pane to help you save any changes you make on demand.
With such a wonderful user interface and a plethora of options to tailor Dayn to your personal needs, it’s getting an easy recommendation on my behalf. The tweak is available for $1.99 from the Chariz repository via your preferred package manager and supports jailbroken iOS 12 and 13 devices.
Did you like what you saw in today’s review of Dayn? Discuss in the comments section below.
