I tell ya, if it’s one thing I’ve missed in my move from Windows Mobile to the iPhone, it’s the Today Screen. It’s an important part of the Windows Mobile experience, and it’s really a pretty cool idea. You have all your important information like calls, RSS, weather, calendar, and tasks — all in one, centralized location. You can even customize a today screen with different plugins. But on the iPhone you’re stuck with a blank screen that you can slide to unlock. I say “stuck” as an iPhone user, but there are quite a few apps on Windows Mobile to mimic the iPhone unlock screen. Ironic.
Anyhow, I was really interested in the beta of Intelliscreen when it came out. I wasn’t there right from the start, but development from 0.7 onwards got really interesting. A lot changed when the software hit version 1.0, so if you’re interested in exploring all the nooks and crannies, you’ve come to the right spot. If you need a free booking software, you can check here and get it here!
Installation and basics
Let’s get this clear right away: you need a jailbroken iPhone, the app won’t be in the Apps store, and there’s no 100% guarantee of iPhone 2.0 compatibility. But seeing as every firmware up until now has been cracked, we can keep our fingers crossed.
In any case, back to installation… to access Intelliscreen you’ve got to add this Installer source: http://intelliborn.com/repo. Then use Installer to install the latest version (1.05 as of writing this) and then reboot (not restore!) your iPhone.
Once it’s downloaded, you’ve got access to a 10-day full trial of Intelliscreen. After this point you’ll have to pay for a license. I’ve tried to simplify the licenses a bit as follows (but the full details are available here)
- $5 for basic license — vanilla Intelliscreen. Calendar, mail, weather, sms, RSS, and sports.
- $20 for premium license — Vanilla plus (it’s like they’ve added caramel swirls…mmm). Resizable docks, multiple weather and account support, a second Intelliscreen, access to upcoming 1.x features. This is where it’s at.
- $50 premium with support — This apparently includes e-mail support, but I never received any details from Intelliscreen about what the support would entail (I asked, but never received a response).
I got my hands on a Premium license for the purposes of this review, so I’ll talk about what people would get to play with during the 10-day trial. Alright, now let’s get to the meat of this review. Let’s talk about Intelliscreen.
Windows (not the OS) on an iPhone
Take a look at the iPhone unlock screen. It’s beautiful, but there isn’t much to do on it.
Now have a look at it with Intelliscreen (I don’t keep too much on mine):
Intelliscreen is essentially a plugin made up of different, scaleable, customizable windows on your unlock screen. The program runs right over your unlock screen wallpaper and can take as much or as little space as you want it to. If the amount of content is more than the window can display, there’s no need to panic (that’d be a bit much, calm down!). You can scroll lists just like in any of the native iPhone apps.
The windows can be themed with different skins to match your wallpaper, and it’s great being able to customize something more on the unlock screen. All that unused, empty space was making me jittery. Intelliscreen is a warm, informationy hug that my iPhone gives me whenever it wakes up.
Intelliscreen runs on your unlock screen, but its settings page is reached via the springboard. Once you tap on it you’ll see two buttons up top: a preview button on the left, and an apply settings button on the right (note: you don’t need to press apply, the home button does the same thing).
Below that is a switch to enable or disable (god, why would you want to do this?) the program. Below all of this is the juicy stuff. Let’s dig in. 
Layouts and Pages
During the beta you simply selected what you wanted to display from drop-down list in settings. With the release of version 1.0 the interface improved by leaps and bounds, and there is now a dynamic and visual representation of your unlock screen. The buttons at the bottom represent the different features you can add, and the numbers on said buttons tell you which page they’re on.
Page? What’s that ye say? Intelliscreen actually gives you two unlock screens (only one with the basic license). So if you want to keep your email and SMS on one page and your sports on another, your unlock screen never gets too crowded. You flip between pages by double tapping on the clock at the top of the screen. Easy peezy with just a pinch of lemon squeezy.
Another way to manage the space on your unlock screen is to resize the windows on it. If you have a lot of calendar items (Intelliscreen shows two by default), just pinch the window and make it as big or small as you’d like. You can even resize horizontally and the text will shrink to fit. Once you’ve got the settings the way you want them on the unlock screen, you can just double tap on a window to lock it in place.
Intelliskin
A great extra bit of customization are the included skins. You can choose from nine skins by default and download more via download (you need to know the URL of the skin you’re downloading). The skins can dim the wallpaper you choose, add different levels of opacity to the Intelliscreen windows, as well as change their colours. I’m not sure how advanced the skinning capabilities here are (could you make elaborate designs or borders for windows?). I tried googling for skins, but the product might just be too new to have any popular ones just yet. In any case, the one big improvement I’d like for this section would be a live preview. The layout section gives you a live preview of the windows as you add them, and I believe the skinning section would benefit from the same treatment. As it is now you have to go into the skins meu, choose a name of a skin, back out, and then preview it. It’s just too long-winded for me, especially considering how well they dealt with the layout page.
So what kind of info can I access?
Oh, I was hoping I’d ask that question. That makes it easier for me to elaborate on the features!
Calendar
Easily one of the best features of the program, calendar displays your appointments on the unlock (I keep wanting to say “today”) screen in a list. You can choose to display today’s appointments, a combo of today’s and tomorrow’s, or the next 10-100 appointments you’ve got on your schedule. Swiping across the calendar will allow you to launch it in the last used view mode (if you left calendar in month mode, it’ll be back in month).
Here’s another decent default feature that’s really brought to life by Intelliscreen. The Mail app on the iPhone has a counter over its icon when there’s mail, but you’re otherwise oblivious to any new mail you might receive. There are no pop-ups (like for SMS or calendar events) and it’s easy to miss the vibration and noise when you get a new email.
Intelliscreen can display new messages or 10-100 recent mesages on the unlock screen and can load up the mail app with a swipe. The basic version only allows one account, but the premium version multiple accounts. There’s also a “tap to check mail” feature that you can toggle, which adds a small refresh button in the top-right corner of the Mail window of your unlock screen. Pressing this allows you to manually check for new mail right from the unlock screen. It also causes the mail window to stay on always-on (it hides itself automatically if you picked “only new messages”), so if you want it to show up only if there’s new e-mail, remember to turn “tap to check” off.
One feature I definitely would love to have is the ability to launch Mail on a per-account basis by swiping Intelliscreen.
SMS
Now here’s a fairly simple section, and some people might even opt to turn it off since the iPhone already offers a similar feature. By default, SMS on the iPhone will display on the unlock screen (assuming the device was on standby) with a “slide to view” prompt at the bottom. But should you choose to activate Intelliscreen’s SMS window you will completely bypass the default pop-up on the unlock screen and replace it with a window very similar to Mail. The same slide to view rule applies, but only if you slide on the window itself. As with mail and calendar, you can display only new SMS or the most recent 10-100 texts.
Weather
I’ve always wondered why the icons on the springboard (aside from calendar) don’t update. I know it would take up a few CPU cycles here and there, but would it kill them to update the weather icon every three hours? Six hours? Ok. Rant over.
The weather plugin works as you’d think it should. It displays a forecast for the next six days (including today) in either Fahrenheit or Celcius. You can add any city that’s supported by the Weather Underground, and the premium license of Intelliscreen supports multiple cities simultaneously (just swipe vertically to see other cities). Swiping horizontally on weather will bring up a “Safari It” button to show Weather Underground’s site based on which city you were viewing. The weather updates itself once per day or via the refresh button on the top-right of the window.
News Feeds
In this category you can choose from a selection of news feeds from the likes of the BBC, CNN, and Fox. Or you can add your own. Once you’ve chosen the feeds you want to add you can display 3-20 of the most recent articles. Displaying “only new” isn’t an option here, and you don’t currently have the ability to mark feeds as read (it’s a noted feature request though). The updating for news feeds is pretty flexible, with minute, hour, and day intervals available.
Swiping to launch will load the full version of the specified article in Safari. As useful as all the news feed features are, not having a way to mark items as read really sets it back a lot in terms of usage. I’m sure they’ll get to the feature soon enough, but right now Google Reader in Safari is a lot more convenient when managing multiple feeds.
Sports
If you’re one of those folks who just has to know the score wherever you are, having live feeds on your unlock screen is going to be a real treat. I’ll have to admit, I’ve never followed any major leagues aside from the NBA. When I tried to get the ESPN scores (only ESPN is supported thus far) for basketball and did manual refreshes, I was greeted with only a blank page. Apparently that’s what happens when you try to look up NBA scores after the Playoffs are done 😀
MLB scores were the only ones that would show up when I updated. They showed the final scores per team, or the current scores alongside the inning. Swiping on a game score will launch Safari on an ESPN Gamecast page, but I never got the page to load in Safari.
Updating the sports page is much the same as the news feeds, and there is also a button to manually refresh on the unlock screen.
Alerts
Now here is one of my personal favourites. By default, the iPhone does a decent job of reminding you about new e-mail, SMS, and missed phone calls. Small boxes will pop up on your unlock screen and you’ll be alerted. But one of the gripes I have with Apple’s system is that it will only tell you things once. If you get an SMS it will vibrate and ring once, and the same goes for calendar updates and missed calls. Furthermore, to be alerted to these missed notifications, you’ve also got to wake the iPhone up. 
This isn’t so with Intelliscreen :D. The new alert functions have made sure that missed calls, e-mails, and SMS don’t stay unnoticed for very long. You can choose to be alerted with sound (choose an SMS sound), flashing screen, vibration, or any combo of the three. The interval between alerts is also customizable, and so my iPhone alerts me every 15 minutes about new mail, SMS, or missed calls. I’d show a screenshot of an alert in action, but all it is is my screen turning flashing blue whilst the iPhone is asleep. Use your imagination!
Something I can show you, however, is a shot of the taskbar icons. This is another non-intrusive way of displaying a missed SMS/Email/call. The icons reside on the … taskbar? You know, the one on the top of your iPhone. Here’s a shot of me with a new e-mail. Notice the upper-right corner. Now you’ll know about new mail even from inside the iPod application.
General Usage and Bugs
I’ve used Intelliscreen for over a month now with the various betas, and for almost three weeks now with a 1.x version. During this time I’ve never noticed any decrease in battery life, despite all the alerts and things to display on my unlock screen. The speed of my system is also the same — fast and smooth as ever.
The software also does a great job of staying out of your way in most situations, although there are some improvements that could be made. The full-screen album art that displays on the unlock screen while you play music can be blocked by Intelliscreen’s windows. Having some sort of “hide while music is playing” option would be great, and this is currently a feature request noted by Intelliborn (it’s on the website, at least). There are also just a few bugs here and there, like SMS not launching when Mail is already loaded, or how Mail actually takes the place of my calendar when the box is “locked” on the setup screen.
I’ve also submitted as a feature request is alerts for calendar events. It’s one of the things that really disappointed me with the iPhone after switching from Windows Mobile. WM calendar alerts will hunt you down like hellhounds and make sure you know that “it’s 1 PM and you have to pick up the laundry!!!!”. The iPhone is a lot more lax about things. It’ll vibrate twice and say “hey, Rag…do the thing that you were supposed to do at 1 PM.” Sorry, iPhone, but that doesn’t cut it for me. Intelliscreen supports missed SMS, Emails, and call alerts, so I’d really love to have calendar event alerts added to that list as well.
However, all of these are small bugs and I trust that Intelliborn will come around to them soon. One thing I do hope they will address sooner rather than later, however, is the pricing. I think this is a great piece of software, but after having been spoiled with all of the premium features, I think they’ve left basic just a little too basic. Multiple weather reports I can do without, but not even allowing me to resize windows on a basic license just feels a bit too steep. A few of my friends who used Intelliscreen during beta will not be buying the premium version because of its price, and they won’t touch the basic version because of the lack of customizability. I have no idea what the development costs are like, but perhaps a more featured $5 basic license would do Intelliscreen some good. The premium license seems about on-par with what I know from Windows Mobile today screen plugins, but a great $5 basic license would kick ass.
Summing it all up
Let’s be all grand and sweeping about this. Hold on for just one second while I stand up on my desk…ok.
I think this really is one of the killer apps for the iPhone right now. I know it’s a jailbreak app, and it’s not going to be on the Apps store, but it’s become the app that I rely on for daily usage. I love seeing the blank screen on the iPhone flash blue to signify a new e-mail, and I love seeing all my calendar events for tomorrow right as my iPhone wakes up. Intelliscreen shows me as much or as little as I want, and it does it all with oodles of style. Intelliborn has really enhanced my iPhone experience with Intelliscreen. So if you’re down with jailbreaking and no 100% guarantee of iPhone 2.0 support (Intelliborn says they’ll definitely work on it though), go get your license right now!
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Critical Info
Developer: Intelliborn
Availability: Installer: http://intelliborn.com/repo — see installation notes near top of review.
Price: $5 basic license, $20 premium, $50 premium w/ support
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