Barrel is a really neat jailbroken mod that I recently found out about.  It’s $2.99 in Cydia, and allows you to add cool little transitions when you flip through your SpringBoard pages.  Read on to see if it’s worth the money.

When you download the application, you get (as usual with small tweaks like this) an entry in your device’s Settings application.  So, when you go into Settings and tap on Barrel, you are presented with a little preliminary screen showing you what effect you currently have set.  When you tap on that, you get all the choices of effects you can set.  At the top is normal (no effects), which is what you usually have.  Just a simple side-to-side animation when swiping through your homescreen pages.  Below that you have cube (inside).  This one is really neat, and the name should give you an idea of what it does.  If you’re following along and you’ve downloaded the application, even better.  Just select it, return to your SpringBoard, and swipe between pages.  No need to respring or anything.

Since the rest of the process is pretty simple, I’ll just give a brief description for each:

1. Normal: normal [duh]
2. Cube (inside): inside cube [duh]
3. Cube (outside): opposite of above
4. Page slide down: pages fade and fly in from bottom corners
5. Page slide up: opposite of above
6. Curl and roll away: All of your apps form into a circle, mix up, then return to normal grid layout

Curl and roll away is by far the most crazy.  A bit too extreme for me.  I like cube outside the best.

So, that’s about it for Barrel.  Very simple little tweak.  They are adding more animations, apparently curl and roll away is the newest.  For now though, I wouldn’t recommend dropping $3 on this, as it’s kind of a novelty.  Sure it’s cool, but it really doesn’t do much.  Maybe it’ll be worth it when they add more animations.  For now though, unless money is burning a hole in your pocket or you are crazy about little animations like this, I think your money is better spent eleswhere.  If I had $3, I would take a nice lunch at McDonalds over some cute little SpringBoard animations.  But that’s just my opinion.  You might want to check out some videos of this one before you buy.

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