Imperium Reinvents Multitasking On The iPhone [Jailbreak]

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Imperium brings an OS X Lion-like feel to iOS
Imperium brings an OS X Lion-like feel to iOS.

Every once in a while a jailbreak tweak comes along that tires to reinvent multitasking on the iPhone. We’ve seen webOS-inspired tweaks like Multifl0w, multiasking-focused tweaks like Zephyr, and many others over the years.

A relatively new package called Imperium aims to change the way we jailbreakers multitask on the iPhone yet again. Is it worth the $1 price tag? Let’s take a closer look.

Imperium's settings let you assign apps to the tweak's dock.

Developed by Saltb0x (maker of MyAssistant for Siri, LockGestures, and more), Imperium adds a multitude of functionality to your iPhone with the magic of Activator. In case you didn’t know, Activator allows you to enable a tweak like Imperium with a quick action anywhere in iOS, like double tapping the status bar or holding the Home button. In this case, Imperium can be initiated with an Activator action, thereby allowing it to effectively replace Apple’s own app switcher.

Once you initiate Imperium, you have 4 different windows to deal with. The first shows you the apps you currently have running. From here you can open each app by tapping on the icon. You can also kill an app quickly.

Swiping over one page will take you to the settings part of Imperium. This is where the tweak really shines, as you have quick access to the most used Settings preferences anywhere in iOS. You can toggle screen brightness, volume, Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplane Mode, Location Services, and the iPhone’s flashlight torch. You can also send a quick tweet, take a photo with the Camera app, perform a Google search, toggle the iOS screen rotation lock, and lookup song lyrics from music playing in the Music app. The Power Alert option presents you with a dialog box for respringing, restarting, shutting down, etc. your jailbroken iPhone. There’s a lot of settings and features packed into one window.

The last two pages of Imperium let you quickly launch apps and control your music.

The next window in Imperium lists all of the apps you have on your iPhone. There’s a dock of apps you can quickly open by assigning an app to each placeholder in Imperium’s settings. You can have 4 apps you use often but don’t want in your main iOS dock displayed in Imperium, which is pretty nifty. The last window of Imperium has a pretty basic music player for playing/pausing a track from the Music app.

Pull to refresh kills all running apps on your iPhone.

There are a couple other Imperium features that make it a compelling tweak, like the ‘pull to refresh’ option in the Backgrounded Apps window for killing all running processes. The built-in music player is nice, but I don’t find it be that functional throughout my day. You can access Imperium with an Activator action from the iPhone’s lock screen or Home screen, so the ease of access is everywhere.

I like Imperium, but I found it be slightly unstable during testing. The tweak would occasionally cause my springboard to crash, so hopefully the dev can work out the kinks with a future update. For $1, Imperium is worth considering for your jailbroken iPhone. It’s available in Cydia now.

 

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