Add Gestures, Button Shortcuts, and Custom Menus to Your iPhone / iPad on iOS 7 Using Activator (Video)

After you jailbreak you iPhone, one of the great benefits are tweaks that allow you to customize your device in ways you wouldn’t normally be allowed to. Some of the most useful of these changes are the ability to add gestures (i.e. pinch with three fingers on the screen causes an action to happen), button shortcuts (i.e. using the Touch ID to go home instead of having to push the button), and custom menus (having a set of actions appear conveniently on the screen whenever you do a certain gesture or push a button). Thankfully, Activator, available in the Cydia store, can not only do all of these but even allow you to choose what each gesture or button shortcut does based on what screen you are currently looking at. Not bad, right? Here’s how to use Activator to setup gestures, button shortcuts, and custom menus in your iOS 7 device.

I. Jailbreak your iPhone/iPad

To do this procedure you must be jailbroken. If you aren’t, you can head to our Jailbreak How To’s section and pick the jailbreak for your version of iOS (currently at the time of writing this is 7.0.4). Once done with that procedure and you have Cydia installed, head back here to continue.

II. Install Activator

1. Open Cydia.

2. Tap Search in the bottom right corner.

3. Type in Activator.

4. Tap on Activator when it shows up.

5. Tap Install at the top right.

6. Tap Restart.

III. Setup Gestures and Edit Buttons Using Activator

1. Open Activator.

2. Tap Anywhere (to choose gestures/shortcuts that work no matter what you are looking at on the device), At Home Screen (for gestures/shortcuts that only work when viewing the home screen), In Application (for gestures/shortcuts that work only when viewing an open app), or At Lock Screen (for gestures/shortcuts that only work when viewing the lock screen).

3. Select the button or gesture you want to trigger an action.

4. Select the action you want to happen.

5. Hit back twice and repeat for all shortcuts and gestures you want to create.

IV. Create Custom Action Menus Using Activator

1. Open Activator.

2. Tap on Menus.

3. Tap Add New Menu.

4. Type in a name for this new menu and hit Add.

5. Tap the menu you just created.

6. Tap Add Action.

7. Select an Action you’d like to pop up in this menu.

8. Tap back.

9. Repeat 6-8 until you have all the actions you want in this menu.

10. Once satisfied with the menu, hit back twice to get back to the main screen.

11. Do steps 2-5 of Section I but choose the new menu under Menus when choosing the action. It will now pop up whenever you use the gesture or button you chose.

Enjoy!