TinyPlayer Is An Extensively Customizable Floating Music Player For iOS
Apple’s mobile devices offers a few different ways to control audio playback without having to launch an app. Apart from the clicker on the EarPods that accompany current-gen iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, the OS offers playback controls on the Lock screen as well as the Control Center, which is just a swipe away at all times.
You’ll seldom find yourself in situations where none of these cut it, but if you do, a good place to look for a solution would be the jailbreak store, and a good jailbreak tweak with which to start would be TinyPlayer. This iOS 9 / iOS 8 Cydia tweak, which currently has a free Lite version available on the BigBoss repository with a more feature rich Pro variant on the way, lets you launch a tiny, floating music player from anywhere in the OS. No larger than a notification banner, the floating player can be dragged around freely and offers basic playback controls in addition to two themes that you can switch between on the fly.
The player appears as soon as the tweak is installed and the SpringBoard restarts, but can be dismissed at any time and launched again from anywhere with a single Activator gesture. You will, of course, have to assign an Activator gesture/trigger to the tweak first. This can be done from the preferences section the tweak adds for itself in the Settings app. Activator offers a few audio-related triggers that should prove to be ideal here, though we’d like to see an option to set separate triggers for launching and dismissing the player, maybe in the Pro version. This could allow users to, say, have the floating player appear when headphones are plugged in and automatically dismissed when they are disconnected.
The player has a simple set of controls to go along with its compact design. There’s a solitary play/pause button on the left that you can hold down to reveal additional playback controls. Swipe these controls leftward and you’ll be able to share your track over Facebook and Twitter. Alternatively, you can double-tap and triple-tap anywhere else on the player to quickly switch to next and previous tracks respectively. Lastly, if you hold down on the player, it will switch between its light and dark themes as soon as you let go.
Our favorite thing about the player is that it sits well with the the iOS 9 design language. It is quite common for tweaks of this kind to seem out of place within the UI, so it’s nice to see when the implementation is polished in this manner.
TinyPlayer Lite can be downloaded for free from the BigBoss repository right now. The Pro version is in the pipeline with an extensive set of additional features, such as volume controls, the ability to resize and rotate the player, background colors that adapt to the album artwork, customizable transparency, the option to snap the player to the edge of the screen or drag it past the edge to hide it, and much more. Sounds like something any audiophile with a jailbroken iOS device would want to keep an eye on.
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