If you've jailbroken your iPhone, then are a number of ways to create a shortcut so that you can quickly launch favorite app, send a tweet, call your Favorite contacts, open a URL in Safari, turn on the flashlight etc.
Now you can do most of that without jailbreaking. Folks at App Cubby have launched an awesome app called Launch Center that aims to address one of the limitations of Apple's iOS without the need to jailbreak your iPhone.
Launch Center app allows you to launch the following apps or trigger these actions:
- Phone
- SMS/iMessage
- Apps
- Flashlight
- Google search
- Custom URL actions
Launch Center also allows you to schedule launch actions, which means that you can access them via iOS Notification Center or Lock screen.
App Cubby recently released a new version of Launch Center, which comes with support for a number of popular apps and in case of Tweetbot - you can create shortcuts to tweet, tweet with username, see the timeline, access user profile, use search etc. It also allows you to create shortcuts for various actions in the Facebook app.
While there are quite a few apps that have tried to bring similar functionality via iOS Notification Center, none of them have featured a user interface, which is as simple and intuitive as the Launch Center app.
You can also use the urls mentioned here to create shortcuts to access various Settings toggles using the Launch website option.
It looks like App Cubby is making use of URL schemes - the same trick that allows you to save the custom home screen shortcuts for the Settings toggle, to launch apps or trigger actions. But according to reports, Apple has disabled the URL schemes in iOS 5.1, which will quite likely impact the functionality of the app. Let's hope Apple changes its mind.
Launch Center is available in the App Store for $0.99 and you can download the iPhone app using this App Store link.
As always, let us know what you think about this app in the comments.
This app is pretty lame. Some much better launch apps out there for NC.
How about telling us the name of the apps, as we have seen a few and they have awful UI and don’t offer functionality such as scheduling tasks etc like Launch Center.
Touché, well deserved response. On another note omni stat is a pretty nice SBS alternate widget with a decent UI.
http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/07/jailbreak-only-omnistat-widget-an-sbsettings-style-widget-for-notification-center
omni stat is definately cooler than launchpad.
Sweet awesome
I figured it was crap when I saw the new york times in the screenshot.
The only interesting thing is that it can launch things at a scheduled time. Other than that it is just another group of icons hiding inside of an app instead of a folder.