5 apps to give your phone superpowers
These automators, taskers and
shortcut makers can quickly hack Android or iOS to do your mobile bidding
If you want to go beyond
the basic stu f f ever yone does with their phone -either by extending its
capabilities or by taking more control over what a phone already does -we've
got just the collection of tools for you.
Tasker
Tasker ($ 3, Android) is
perhaps the best known automation app for Google's mobile OS. It lets you
manipulate alerts, apps, notifications, dialog boxes, phone settings, inputs,
outputs and more to take charge of your device.
What you can do: Launch a
particular app at a certain time, turn off WiFi when the screen dims, put your
phone on silent as soon as you enter a specific area, protect certain apps with
a passcode, or change the device wallpaper on a timer.
The app can also take
photos if a wrong password is entered, change the ringtone volume based on
who's calling, set up reminders for missed notifica tions and much more.
Workflow
Install Workflow ($3, iOS)
on your iPhone and you get access to a suite of tools for greas ing the wheels
between the apps you use most often. It's like a long series of APIs
(Application Programming Interfaces) that allow apps to talk to each other in
ways they otherwise wouldn't.
What you can do: The app
let s you qu ick ly delete screenshots from the camera roll, open the Spotify
track for a particular YouTube video, get an Uber ride to the next location on
your calendar, open li n ks i n Ch rome and send web pages to a Kindle, to name
a few examples.
IFTTTDo
If you're looking for the
most impressive results with the least effort then IFTTT (If This Then That) is
the one for you. The main IFTTT app is called IF (free, AndroidiOS) and acts as
a kind of strippeddown version of the full web app. Alongside that there are
the DO apps: DO Button, DO Note and DO Camera (AndroidiOS) which are even
simpler and let you associate basic actions on your mobile with automatic tasks
on other channels.
What you can do: IFTTT has
hooks in many popular apps and services -save your Instagram favourites to
Dropbox, update Facebook via SMS, get weather aler ts via tweets and so on. As
far as Android and iOS are concerned, supported channels cover SMS, the phone
app, photos, lo c at ion, battery status, contacts and reminders.
Automate
Automate (freemium ,
Android) gives you the power to automatically trigger all kinds of events on
your phone , from changing device settings to sending out texts or emails.
There are hundreds of actions, conditions, triggers and loops to make use of.
What you can do: Turn off
WiFi to save battery after a minute of no connectivity, set your phone to
vibrate during evening hours, link the media volume to the ringer volume and
launch Spotify when headphones are plugged in. Other tasks include automatica l
ly erasi ng temporary cached files at regular points in the day, turning up the
brightness when a call comes in, reading out text messages, etc.
Launch Center Pro
Describing itself as “speed
dial for everyday tasks“, Launch Center Pro ($ 5, iOS) enables you to set up
shortcuts that can be opened from the home screen or the notification center
-not just shortcuts to apps but shortcuts to specific functions within those
apps.
What you can do: The app
lets you create short cuts for calling specific people, scanning barcodes,
searching Yelp for a certain type of place, translating phrases wit h a tap,
archiving your tweets to a file in Dropbox, running certain queries on Wikipedia
and so forth.
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