Change Your Icons' Appearance Individually with Athena 2 Tweak

After optimizing efficiency, one of the major reasons that people jailbreak their iPhones for is to tweak the aesthetics of the interface and make their phone unique in appearance. The new and improved jailbreak tweak Athena 2 is a powerful tool to this end. There are a lot of tweaks out there that let you modify the overall appearance of your interface; this one lets you do that, but also lets you customize the individual icons.

Athena 2 jailbreak tweak

Once you have downloaded Athena 2 from Cydia's BigBoss repository you can head to Settings where you'll find an Athena 2 pane. Inside you will find several options:

  • Tint Enabled - A slider to enable the tweak.
  • Tint Color - Leads to a menu of colors.
  • Tint Mode - Leads to a menu of various tint applications.
  • Tint Intensity - Leads to a menu for tint intensity (0-1, in .1 increments).
  • Disable Jittering - A slider that disables the jittering that occurs when you tap and hold an icon.
  • Modify Opacity - A slider to change the opacity of tinted icons.
  • Modify Label Opacity - A slider to change the opacity of icon labels.
Athena 2 jailbreak tweak

Inside the tint color menu there is a "Default" setting, which will set a color for all icons. Beneath you will see a list of all of your apps. If you don't use the default setting you can change the color of each individual app's icon by tapping on it and choosing one of 15 colors. The tint mode menu also includes a default setting and settings for individual icons. There are a lot of modes, not all of which are intuitively titled:

  • Normal
  • Multiply
  • Screen
  • Overlay
  • Darken
  • Lighten
  • Color Dodge
  • Color Burn
  • Soft Light
  • Hard Light
  • Difference
  • Exclusion
  • Hue
  • Saturation
  • Color
  • Luminosity
  • Clear
  • Copy
  • Source In
  • Source Out
  • Source Atop
  • Destination Over
  • Destination In
  • Destination Out
  • Destination Atop
  • XOR
  • Plus Darker
  • Plus Lighter
Between the colors, modes, intensities and opacities there is a seemingly endless amount of options, and it can take a while to figure out what you're doing. It took me about 20 minutes of messing around to come up with the beautiful home screen pictured above (note: the shadows within some of the icons are from the Solstice theme, not Athena 2). Along the way I also managed to make some icons invisible and some completely black.

If you want to individualize your home screen's appearance, Athena 2 is the perfect tool. It is well worth the 99¢, and it is free if you have the original. Athena 2 requires iOS 7 or better and a jailbroken iPhone.