Launch Center Pro has become my second SpringBoard. I have been testing the app for the past month, and it’s a fantastic upgrade over Launch Center, which we have covered on multiple occasions on MacStories. If you were a Launch Center user before, you’ll most definitely want to check out the new, separate Pro version.

For many, it’s difficult to see the appeal of software like Launch Center. Originally conceived as a Notification Center-based launcher for common actions such as toggling Bluetooth settings and custom URLs supported by third-party apps, Launch Center turned into a powerful hub to collect shortcuts for system actions and app-specific URLs. The discontinuation of Settings shortcuts in iOS 5.1 didn’t diminish Launch Center’s functionality, which gained support for several third-party applications and a nicer interface with support for icons and even more actions.

What started as an interesting hack to put shortcuts in Notification Center eventually became a utility that, in its niche, is redefining the concept of “launching actions”, rather than apps. This goes back to a fundamental issue behind the nature of the iOS Home screen – as I have previously written – and Launch Center Pro, while retaining the basic functionality of Launch Center, doubles down on this very distinction between finding apps and launching actions.

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One of my favorite apps in a long time, App Cubby’s Launch Center (our previous coverage here and here), just got a lot better thanks to an update released on the App Store a few minutes ago, version 1.2. Whilst one wouldn’t normally expect an app to get significant improvements in a 1.2 update, Launch Center’s latest version is, I believe, quite possibly the greatest addition to the app since its release, making it extremely easier to discover new third-party apps that can be integrated with no further configuration in Launch Center.

For those who are not familiar with Launch Center already, as we detailed in our previous reviews this utility allows you to set up custom shortcuts on your iPhone to launch common actions or often-used applications with a single tap. Upon firing up Launch Center, you’ll be able to create and manage shortcuts for, say, calling your wife or texting a coworker; you can create a quick action to activate the iPhone’s flashlight, launch a website in Safari, tweet, email someone, or Google your clipboard. As I’ve written before, Launch Center has replaced a bunch of existing apps in my dock thanks to its super-simple approach to aggregating default apps and functionalities that can be triggered through the popular URL schemes you can find documented on websites such as HandleOpenURL. And it’s from this idea of hidden URLs that only a few people know about that App Cubby decided to make Launch Center 1.2 all about app detection and integration.

Launch Center 1.2 leverages your apps’ internal URL schemes to simplify the process of discovering new shortcuts and speeding up your workflow. Launch Center comes with a new section called “Supported Apps” inside the Launch App menu, which lists third-party apps that can work with Launch Center through a URL. Launch Center organizes this list in Installed Apps (the ones you already have on your device) and Featured Apps (which you don’t have installed, and you can get from the App Store). This list of support apps, it turns out, has been built directly by App Cubby and it is hosted on the developers’ servers alongside links to the icons that, as you can see from the screenshots, are served directly to the iPhone and look great on the Retina Display. The reason behind App Cubby’s decision to keep the list of supported apps on their servers is to encourage more developers to get in touch and ask for integration in Launch Center which, ultimately, has a chance of becoming the de-facto solution for quickly accessing apps’ settings/sections/menus using a technology Apple is (seemingly) okay with.

App Cubby writes:

We’d also appreciate help in spreading the word about URL schemes. It’s surprising how few apps support them, and those that do don’t always go very deep with supported actions. If you have an idea for an app and/or action that would make sense in Launch Center, please contact the developer of that app directly and point them to this page.

Launching an app is great, but the true power of Launch Center is in the ability to trigger specific actions deep within an app. For example, while using Tweetbot, you may leave the app buried deep within a search. To launch the app and tweet might take quite a few taps as you have to back out of the search, tap the compose button, select an account, paste text, etc. Launch Center can make that a reliable 2 taps. 1 to open Launch Center and 1 to trigger the action.

In my Launch Center, I was pleased to see many of my most-used apps were already supported. I have set up shortcuts for 1Password, Instagram’s camera and Facebook; I tweaked Tweetbot’s shortcut to jump directly to my Favorites, and created an OmniFocus launch to create a new task “using clipboard for note”. Other apps I see as supported (and installed on my device) include Agenda, Evernote, Consume, Flipboard, Delivery Status Touch, Camera+, Instapaper, Skype, and Reeder. Hopefully a lot more will be coming soon thanks to App Cubby’s decision to make their iOS App URLs page public.

As I said above, Launch Center has become one of my favorite new apps for iPhone. It speeds up my workflow and looks neat, and I look forward to seeing how many developers will get in touch with App Cubby to formally introduce support for Launch Center in their apps (I also would like to see App Cubby figure out a way to fetch icons for any app).

You can find Launch Center 1.2 in the App Store.

We reviewed App Cubby’s Launch Center when the app was released back in December after Apple rejected an initial version based on Notification Center. Even without fancy Notification Center integration, Launch Center has become one of my new favorite apps, earning a spot in my iPhone’s dock because of its greatest achievement: allowing me to save an unlimited number of shortcuts for actions that I repeat every day (such as calling my mom or iMessaging my team) in a single place. I’d argue that I even prefer Launch Center without Notification Center support as it’s more focused.

And today with version 1.1 it gets even better. Launch Center 1.o, in fact, allowed you to create shortcuts through custom URLs and activate them with a single tap. But you still had to remember you had to do something — you’ve got your nice action to call your dad, but what if you forget to call him? The shortcut becomes useless. Similarly, your iOS device comes with alarms, but you can’t associate actions to them; it’s easy to set an alarm in three hours for something “important”, and forget what it was all about. Launch Center’s new scheduled launch actions are a fantastic mix of shortcuts and alarms: you can now assign a custom alarm to each of your shortcuts. When the time comes, Launch Center will fire off a local iOS notification that will show up in Notification Center, and take you to the configured action…which will activate and call your dad with one tap, to finish the example above. It’s genius.

I use Launch Center every day and I can already see scheduled launch actions becoming an integral part of my workflow — imagine setting up alarms for emails, messages or just about any app you know you’re going to use at a certain point in time. Launch Center 1.1 combines the speed of custom URLs with local notifications to create smart alarms that have both context and the appropriate speed to feel immediate and intuitive.

Launch Center 1.1 is available in the App Store at $0.99.

Shortly before the Christmas holiday, a few apps got a lot of attention in Apple media after being barred from the App Store for inappropriate use of the Notification Center. These apps, App Switcher, Launch Center, and Quickpick, were submitted with the intent of using the Notification Center as a way to access a list of customized commands (shortcuts) that take advantage of Apple’s and third party URL schemes. App Switcher and Quickpick were pulled, and Launch Center simply didn’t get approval. The three apps removed this feature and are now available on the App Store as standalone applications.

If you jailbreak your iOS devices, these apps probably aren’t going to find their way into your standard toolkit. Paid and free utilities available through Cydia will mirror features available on Android through widgets, the lock screen, and the Notification Center. Purists, however, could find some value in automating common tasks and reducing the time it takes to perform custom actions. Jeff Broderick’s Settings is free, but the icons are fixed and I decided I only want access to a few. There’s also Icon Project, but I have no desire to fiddle with making icons. Of the apps noted above, Launch Center looks polished and simply presents a clean list of actions.

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