Columba : The best Jailbreak tweak brings some biteSMS features to iOS 8
Many of us are still waiting for a stable release of biteSMS where it finally become compatible with iOS 8 – 8.1.2. However, you don’t have to anymore. A new jailbreak tweak was released today called Columba will definitely could replace biteSMS on jailbroken iOS 8 devices. Columba is here to help improving the built-in messaging application and even add more features into it.
Other than bringing Quick Compose and Quick Reply features, the tweak also supports message forwarding and scheduling, message templates, Emoji popup and much more.
- Message forwarding: If you are tired of copy and paste messages between windows now you can just forward it with a tap of a button.
- Message scheduling: This is one of my favorite feature from this tweak. I can easily setup a time for a text message to be send while I’m doing something else.
- Quick compose from anywhere: I don’t need to be in the Message.app in order to send a text message. Now I can do it anytime and anywhere within the iPhone screen.
- Message templates: Customize what you want to see in your text message screen with existence templates.
- Multi-language support: not good at English? You can choose from 20 different languages.
- Emoji popup
- Conversation history
- and much more
Once you install Columba, a dedicated preferences pane will be available in Settings where you can configure the options provided by the tweak. You can choose between Native or Windowed interface style for quick compose where the later allows you to compose a new message via a popup window whereas the Native style displays the full Messages interface.
There are two ways in which Quick Compose can be invoked. You can launch it via the volume HUD by tapping on the little compose button available on the corner of the HUD or you can invoke it via an Activator gesture. The pane also features options for scheduling messages to be delivered at a specific time as well as creating your own custom message templates.
Columba also provides a quick shortcut to its features via the Messages interface. When you’re inside a conversation, you’ll notice that the camera button has been replaced with a plus button. Tapping on it displays a popup containing Emoji along with buttons for scheduling a message, inserting an image or using a custom message template.
Columba is not as polished as it should have been and is far from being a biteSMS replacement. There’s still a lot of issues that the developer needs to iron out. For instance, when quick compose is invoked, there’s a delay of few seconds until the window appears. I’m also not fond of the design of the user interface as the buttons are not evenly spaced and the text size is too small. Another issue of Columba that is worth mentioning is that when you schedule a message from within a conversation, it sometimes causes the app to crash right away.
Columba is available on Cydia’s BigBoss repo for $2.99 but I wouldn’t recommend you to purchase it until the developer has fixed all the known issues. If you’ve already installed it on your device, let us know what you think about the tweak in the comments section below.