How To Give iOS 5 Notification Center On iPhone A Glassy Blurry Background Effect [Jailbreak Tweak]

We’re big fans of iOS 5 here, except that pesky battery problem of course. One of our favorite changes that Apple made to iOS in its fifth iteration was the addition of the Notification Center – a home for all your push notifications, missed calls and SMS/iMessages to live.

BlurriedNCBackground iPhone 4

There is one niggling irritation with Notification Center, though, and it is that rather horrid ‘linen’ background affect that Apple seems to be such a fan of these days. Some might like it, granted, but we are willing to say there are probably just as many that just can not abide it.

So, how do you get rid of it?

If you are using a jailbroken iOS 5 device, then you can use BlurriedNCBackground to not only remove the offending linen, but to also change the behavior of the background entirely.

Once installed via Cydia for free under the BigBoss repo, BlurriedNCBackground will remove the linen effect completely, making Notification Center transparent. Now you have a selection of options which will allow you to change how blurry you want to make the Home Screen which will now show through the newly-transparent Notification Center.

The one downside to this tweak is the slower than usual Notification Center load times. There is an option in the BlurriedNCBackground settings which will make the blur load after Notification Center, but while that will speed proceedings up, it does ruin some of the experience. Give it a try, and see what you think yourself.

If you are no fan of linen, then this free jailbreak tweak will be just the ticket.

You will obviously need to have a jailbroken device to get it to work. For jailbreaking iOS 5 tethered using Redsn0w, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here, or here if you want to use Sn0wbreeze on Windows. Since jailbreak on iOS 5 is currently limited to tethered boot only, you can install ‘SemiTether’ patch (instructions here) from Cydia to make your jailbreak semi-tethered on iOS 5. For those of you on iOS 5.0.1 can follow our instructions posted here on how to jailbreak using Redsn0w, or here using Ac1dSn0w (instructions with Ac1dSn0w Beta 2 here), or here using Sn0wbreeze.

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