Icon Project Creates Quick iOS Home Screen Shortcuts

iOS: If you’re tired of navigating through the Contacts, Settings or the Browser to perform common actions — like calling someone or turning down the brighness — IconProject will let you create one-tap shortcuts for those things on your home screen.

If you have a particular contact you call often, it would be really useful to have a shortcut on your home screen that calls them as soon as you tap it. Similarly, if you turn Wi-Fi on and off all the time, a one-tap shortcut to access that preference would be much easier than going through the Settings app all the time. Icon Project is an app for iOS that will lets you create customisable home screen shortcuts that perform actions just like these. Just open it up, hit the “Select Type” button above the text box, and you’ll be able to choose between shortcuts for texting somone, calling them, FaceTiming them, opening a URL in Safari, or viewing a contact card. You can then type in their phone number, email address, or the homepage’s URL and hit “Create”. It’ll take you to a web page where you can then hit the Share button, tap “Add to Home Screen”, and put your new shortcut anywhere you want. You can even customise the icon’s look for a truly snazzy home screen.

Creating a shortcut to a setting, like Wi-Fi or Brightness, is a bit trickier. From Icon Project’s main screen, hit the Select Type button and choose URL(Homepage). Then, type in one of the following preferences (as seen in the screenshot to the right), and hit Create. Note that the following preferences are case sensitive, so make sure you type them in exactly as shown:

About – prefs:root=General&path=About
Accessibility – prefs:root=General&path=ACCESSIBILITY
Airplane Mode On – prefs:root=AIRPLANE_MODE
Auto-Lock – prefs:root=General&path=AUTOLOCK
Brightness – prefs:root=Brightness
Bluetooth – prefs:root=General&path=Bluetooth
Date & Time – prefs:root=General&path=DATE_AND_TIME
FaceTime – prefs:root=FACETIME
General – prefs:root=General
Keyboard – prefs:root=General&path=Keyboard
iCloud – prefs:root=CASTLE
iCloud Storage & Backup – prefs:root=CASTLE&path=STORAGE_AND_BACKUP
International – prefs:root=General&path=INTERNATIONAL
Location Services – prefs:root=LOCATION_SERVICES
Music – prefs:root=MUSIC
Music Equalizer – prefs:root=MUSIC&path=EQ
Music Volume Limit – prefs:root=MUSIC&path=VolumeLimit
Network – prefs:root=General&path=Network
Nike + iPod – prefs:root=NIKE_PLUS_IPOD
Notes – prefs:root=NOTES
Notification – prefs:root=NOTIFICATIONS_ID
Phone – prefs:root=Phone
Photos – prefs:root=Photos
Profile – prefs:root=General&path=ManagedConfigurationList
Reset – prefs:root=General&path=Reset
Safari – prefs:root=Safari
Siri – prefs:root=General&path=Assistant
Sounds – prefs:root=Sounds
Software Update – prefs:root=General&path=SOFTWARE_UPDATE_LINK
Store – prefs:root=STORE
Twitter – prefs:root=TWITTER
Usage – prefs:root=General&path=USAGE
VPN – prefs:root=General&path=Network/VPN
Wallpaper – prefs:root=Wallpaper
Wi-Fi – prefs:root=WIFI

It isn’t quite as effective as, say, SBSettings on a jailbroken phone, but since we’re still waiting for an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak, it’s a pretty good way to get quick shortcuts to those settings pages. Check out iDownloadBlog’s post on the subject to read more, and to see a video on how to customise the look of your shortcuts’ icons.

Icon Project [iTunes App Store via Cult of Mac]