Prime Adds Color-Coding To Incoming & Outgoing Entries In iPhone Call Log
Apple’s penchant for perfection fully manifests itself in the company’s choice of UI elements for iOS, but there are still a few idiosyncrasies that make the overall experience of using an iPhone slightly annoying. While the OS gets big things like cloud syncing, app environment and gesture control spot-on, there are some little aspects of it that could have made your life a little easier if improved. Take the stock Phone app for example – while it doesn’t lack much in terms of features, there is a slight inconsistency in the ‘Recents’ tab that might have annoyed you on several occasions.
By default, the iPhone call log displays missed calls in red color, but there is no easy way of distinguishing between incoming and outgoing calls, since they are both shown in the same font. There is a tiny differentiating icon next to each entry, but you can’t analyze the list at a single glance just using that. Jailbreak users can finally address this issue, thanks to the newly released Prime Cydia tweak that brings full color-coding support to the iPhone call log.
Once Prime has been installed on your iPhone, it takes effect immediately, changing the colors of entries in the Recents list automatically without requiring any input or configuration from you. Outgoing calls are colored green, while received calls are shown in blue. I would have preferred to see the received calls in green, since that’s the way things used to be back in the days of feature phones. Unfortunately, Prime has no options for letting users choose the color scheme themselves. The tweak does have a menu in the stock Settings app, but it serves a different purpose.
From the Prime menu in Settings, users can choose to change the color of the dates shown against all the entries in the Recents tab. All the basic colors are available in the list, but before making that choice, you have to enable the ‘Custom Date Color’ option. To apply the change, kill the Phone app from the App Switcher tray and then re-launch it.
We can’t say that Prime is a perfect tweak, but there are rarely any tweaks that focus on the Phone app. Once you get used to all the new colors in your call log, we are sure its usefulness will become clear (or you can ditch the Phone app altogether and switch to ReachFast Contacts instead). The tweak doesn’t cost a thing and can be downloaded from the ModMyi repo of the Cydia store. Prime only works with iOS 6 or later firmware versions on iPhone.
