QuickAdvice: Get Fast Access To Contacts From The Home Screen With Tap2Call
Tap2Call ($0.99) by Nathan M Cory is an app to help you get quick one-tap dial access to your favorite contacts, right on your home screen.
Don't you ever come in a situation where you need a single button on your home screen to call someone or send an email? Yes, there is the method of going into the Phone.app and going to Favorites, or opening up Mail.app or Messages.app and creating a new message to send someone. But these require unnecessary taps and aren't an instant solution.
There has to be a better way. And now there [kind of] is, with Tap2Call.
Tap2Call will appear empty the moment you launch it. But the app draws information directly from your existing Address Book, so you don't need to worry about entering in contact information. Simply tap that "+" button and select a contact.
What if there is multiple contact information? Just select which one you want fast and easy access to, and it will be added to the main screen in the app. Additionally, if you view a contact from the app that you've added, you can add a shortcut to the home screen or delete the contact from the app. You can also select the type of shortcut you want from this screen, such as a phone call or text message, or email or FaceTime.
To create a new shortcut, there will be a popup with a disclaimer to first warn you of this: the contacts photo or icon will be uploaded to their servers to create a shortcut, but no personal information is stored. The photo will then be uploaded and then take you to a page in Mobile Safari once complete.
On Mobile Safari, you're taken to a page that will say "Your shortcut is ready" and give you instructions on how to add it to your home screen. Hit the + button and then "Add to homescreen" and you'll see an icon made with your contacts photo and the icon will be named as your contact.
Once it's added, you'll see the icon appear on your home screen. The icon will also have a symbol to represent the type of easy access you assigned to a contact. Icons will be a phone, speech bubble, envelope, or the FaceTime symbol. It's best to group these contacts together if you have a lot of them, or if you just need the one important few, leave them without a folder.
When you need to use these shortcuts, tapping on them will result in a black screen at first, then another black screen, and then the contact method you've chosen.
The app has settings to let you decide which action to default to for phone numbers and email addresses. The options are call/SMS/FaceTime for phone numbers and email/FaceTime for email addresses. You can always change these per a case-by-case basis later on as well.
My only concern is how do they create this shortcut if no personal data is stored on their servers? It takes me to a web page that somehow lets me get a shortcut to my contacts. It's just my paranoid side kicking in, but it makes me wonder. Because the disclaimer says no information is stored - but then how do we get the web page that turns into a shortcut for calls or emails?
Food for thought. I could be entirely wrong on this.
But if you're looking for something to give you an easier method of getting to your contacts quicker (it is hard to look through your contacts or the Phone.app favorites while driving, for example), then this could prove to be useful.
At $0.99, it's cheaper than your morning coffee and a lot more useful in the long run.
