<Geek Alert> This article is for those who use Launch Center Pro workflows, Omnifocus and have jailbroken device. I don’t have detailed explanations and I assume that you know what I am talking about. In depth explantaions can be found in the included links.
My previous Android experience left me craving a decent launcher on iOS, something that I could access from within any app that would help me multitask. Perhaps if you have an Android device, you should consider Swipepad. Up until the release of Launch Center Pro, my iPhone lacked this functionality.
There are some really cool features here that are making it a killer app, and “dock worthy”. But I don’t keep it on my dock, I don’t even have it on my homescreen. But I access it daily, with one tiny tweak…
Marriage between LCP and Activator
Activator is jailbreak tweak that allows you to set gesture shortcuts on your iPhone, so that you can perform certain actions and/or start applications. The way I use it, is that I’ve setup a shortcut, that everytime I swipe the “status bar” (area where your carrier name, date and time are displayed), it will start Launch Center Pro. If my iPhone home button worked better, I could definitively use LCP instead of home screen.
This “swipe status bar gesture” will work from virtually every application (except those applications that have status bar hidden, but they are in minority). This shortcut alone leaves space for insane multitasking. This addition makes it a powerful ally of your iPhone workflow. You can read something in iBooks and “swipe status bar” to move to LCP, from where you decide what to do next with your clipping. Than return to the apps that you’ve been using (e.g. iBooks).
Scheduling Tasks Instead Of Due Dates
Now I can setup schedueled OmniFocus Perspectives straight from Launchcenter Pro. So in morning when I wake up, all I need to swipe my iPhone LCP notification and get into Morning Ritual Perspective.
You can edit the action you just created, or change the icon or schedule the action to occur at a specific time. For example, schedule the above action to happen at noon. A reminder will pop up in the notification center at that time. Swipe the reminder, and it will launch Launch Center Pro and automatically bring up the create new task screen. It’s gonna look something like this:
That way I’ve created my morning ritual to remind me every time I wake up. It has short bleeping, non intrusive alarm. And I avoided having tons of OmniFocus due reminders cluttering my lists. This way it’s simple and only linked to your iPhone, instead of being “system wide” (showing up due dates on your iPad and Mac unnecessarily).
Setting up reminders is easy, and you do that when you are creating and/or editing the task. You can set specific time, you can make repeated reminders also. They can be daily, hourly, weekly, monthly… All in all, amazing feature that I fell in love with.
How to setup Perspectives, Projects, Contexts and Single Action Lists
Furthermore, not only quick actions, but also contexts, perspectives and single action lists can be included through the Mac link structure as well. A bit more detailed explanation is here. That is how I made all those other icons inside of my Omnifocus folder in LCP. You can deal with most of those
You are going to get the links on the Omnifocus desktop, and you will get them to your phone (by using Notes or some other way) and paste them into LCP as a custom link.
Various Different Shortcuts
Here is the video of Mike Schechter from BetterMess, explaining how he made his shortcuts. While I don’t use most of these, you do have to pay attention to quck prompt.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFWizc5P5I&feature=player_embedded
Quick prompt is important, because recently LCP got TextExpender support, so if you are using it, this could tremendously save your task input time through Text Expander snippets. Hence why I don’t use other snippets included in the video. Here is how Promts look like:
- New Task from Prompt – omnifocus:///add?name=[prompt]
- New Task from Prompt w/ Clipboard – omnifocus:///add?name=[prompt]¬e=[clipboard]
