[iOS Recipe] No. 2 - Handy Shortcuts

 

Very often, I'm seeing on iPhone screens of the people around me this small faint black square superimposed on top.

And so I learned that some are afraid of spoiling their home buttons if they are pressed too many times.

Such virtual button will minimise the use of the physical home button, thereby prolong its lifespan.

But this black square is too distracting to me, especially when I'm playing games.

It seems that there's a neat trick that does the same thing without having the black square appearing.

Since iOS 8, widgets are supported in the Notification Centre.

There are many apps in the App Store that allows user to create shortcuts icons that appears in the Notification Centre widgets.

One of them is AirLaunch.

 

The app allows the user to add shortcuts to contacts, web urls, apps and "System Actions".

 

 

The user can choose from a variety of System actions and one of which is the "Home Button".

When the Home Button is selected, it will appear as an icon in the Notification widget.

So, whenever you are in an opened app or game and you want to exit out to the home screen, you just have to swipe down to bring up the Notification Centre and click on the "Home" icon.

That will bring you to home screen without pressing the physical home button.

There are other similar apps such as Go Launcher, etc.

I love these apps a lot and use them on a daily basis.

<- Back to [iOS Recipe] No. 1

Another Widget for my iPhone

The jailbreak for iOS 7 has been released for near a month now. New tweaks keep pouring in.

One of the latest tweaks which I love a lot is "Live Weather Icon".

It changes the static icon picture of the stock Weather app into a live animated update of the weather condition of the current location.

It shows three information:

1) the weather condition, eg Cloudy

2) an animated image such as raining droplets and moving cloud, etc

3) the temperature

It's particularly useful for me as the workplace that I work in doesn't have windows and I've no vision to whether it's raining or now.

And when I put this icon beside the stock live Clock on the first home page, it feels right at home!

An iOS App Offering Alternative to Widget Functionality

iOS doesn't support Widgets like Android does.

The app, "My Dashboard" for iOS though not bringing widgets functionality to iOS, does provide multiple apps content to be put in a "dashboard" layout which is user-configurable.

For iPhone version, you can arrange up to 2 app stacking vertically per screen.
You can have up to 8 on iPad.

There are quite a number of app content that are supported out of the box:

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Photo, RSS, Calendar and Weather, to name a few.