We look at our iOS devices for a variety of different tasks every day. Whether it’s notifications from apps, our calendar, the weather, the time and alarms, or just seeing how much battery is left our devices, we use our devices a lot throughout the day. Wouldn’t it be great to view this all in one place? Or even better, improve on these tasks? This is what the new tweak entitled “PersonalAssistant” attempts to do.
PersonalAssistant is a lock screen tweak that puts the information you need most on the lock screen. Probably the most notable is the calendar. You can see your next calendar event, along with upcoming ones. Tapping on a banner for one shows the time, title, location, and notes for the event. Below it is your notifications. What I like about this is that it shows all the notifications that are in notification centre. Show it shows apps that were automatically updated as well.
The next one is the weather. In the top right corner shows you the current weather, along with the high and low. Tapping on it shows the weather for the entire day, along with the next 10 days. I find this a nice feature on the iPad, since it doesn’t have a native weather app. In the top left corner, you will find the current time and date. You can also show the seconds in the clock here if you want. I believe here that you can edit alarms as well, but sadly, it is an iOS 9 only feature, and since I am on iOS 8, I was unable to test it.
Right below that is your battery. Tapping on that brings up a pretty cool feature. It shows how battery you have remaining. To the minute (or second, if you have no hours remaining). While I found the battery empty to be quite accurate, I found the others below to be generic, not based on other previous battery drain times. Also, the time for calling is found on the iPad version, which I found rather odd.
And then at the bottom you will find a app picker. You can chose your recent apps, or your favorites. While it works well, I wish there would be a better way to position it, rather than in filling the screen from the left to the right.
Last but certainly not the least is the music player feature. It looks pretty nice, with a little blur of color in the background depending on the album artwork. The only problem I had with it is after I quoted the Music app, it would still show. It would also not show music that started with a “-“.
So, is PersonalAssistant worth $4.99? Yes. Can you get better tweaks for $4.99? Yes, but not ones that do this. I definitely think iOS 9 users have it better here, with the option to edit alarms. I think it would be better if it supported iOS 8.
If this is something your interested in, you can buy PersonalAssistant on the BigBoss repo for $4.99. It supports all iOS devices running iOS 8 or later, which personally I think it really shines on the iPad with the larger display. Let us know in the comments about what you think PersonalAssistant!
