One of the great benefits of the new wave of smartphones is the ability for consumers to have greater control of their diaries using the inbuilt time management features and calendars which sync across all devices. Even the most organized person could do with saving a little bit of time by shortening the more laborious and monotonous tasks associated with our day to day routine.
That could explain why all of a sudden we are seeing a flurry of applications and tweaks being made available for our devices which aim to save time by automating certain tasks or providing shortcuts to the most often used settings. SBSettings is perhaps the most popular out of these tweaks, which offers quick access to a variety of the most used settings on the device. In recent times we have seen the emergence of plenty of tweaks which hook into the new Notification Center to offer quick access to toggles, but the most recent one is a web based service called Quick Contact, which brings Android-like contact shortcuts right at your fingertips.
Quick Contact by Jeff Broderick is effectively a web application which gives users the ability to set up Springboard shortcuts to quick dial, or compose a quick text message to any user. The quick shortcuts are represented as icons on the device’s Springboard, with the icon image being set from a list of defaults within the app, and the name being defined by the user.
Quick Contacts also allows you to upload your own icon artwork if you require something different from the included fifteen options. The Quick Contact service is definitely functional, but seems to be an exercise of aesthetics over actual useful function. The recent trend of using URL schemes to provide user shortcuts has been something which has been scrutinized recently due to a number of developers releasing tweaks.
Although a shortcut is generally a useful thing, I have to really wonder how much quicker this is compared to adding a contact to the favorites list of the Phone application, considering that when you create a quick contact; it has to first of all launch Safari and then launch the phone or messages application. The addition of direct emailing might also be something to consider, but some users may be put off by the fact that Quick Contact requires a certificate to be installed before the automation will actually work.
You can access Quick Contact on your iPhone by visiting this link through Safari.
(via iPhoneCanada)
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