Weather widgets are handy when you’re starting your day, and you’re not sure what sort of weather you will be facing. The default weather widget is serviceable in iOS 5, but weather alerts are better suited to the lock screen than the notifications pane. Weather notifications can be as important as time, and shouldn’t be relegated to a pane where they may be ignored. MJSmash LSSB is a weather widget for the iPhone’s lockscreen which has cool features but unfortunately does too much without focusing on ease of use.
The problem is MJSmash LSSB uses WinterBoard for the widget. Instead of being a standalone widget MJSmash is an entire lockscreen theme. This wouldn’t be a problem if the entire theme looked as good as the animated weather effects, but the font and the replacement text clock don’t look like they belong in iOS. Worse, there’s no guide and no Settings page: just some ‘Smash’ named toggles in WinterBoard and a config file to root around in. This is a project that should have stuck to and polished its strengths.
For fun, I attempted to run MJSmash LSSB on my iPad 3. There was no warning against doing so, but rest assured it doesn’t work properly. It only occupied an iPhone-sized portion of the screen, garbled up my lock screen image, and would persist behind my icons in SpringBoard.
Despite the lack of warning, MJSmash does not work properly on the iPad.
MJSmash LSSB is a free app, but the Cydia page asks for donations on behalf of the iOSAlliance. As it currently stands, MJSmash does not feel like a widget that is ready for prime time, because it’s not user friendly and as a package it does not fit in with iOS. On the other hand, feel free to try it and tell us what you think.
Is the default Notification Center weather widget good enough for you or do you prefer lockscreen weather widgets? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
crap.