Developed by @JonahGrant and Misecia, Hot Links for iPhone serves as central link management to your online social life, as well as natively allowing you to open apps and services, with a tap.
The concept behind this application is very simple. With a growing amount of social networking sites popping up here, there and everywhere, it can be pain to have to navigate to each one of them, individually. Especially through Mobile Safari. I know what your thinking, you have Bookmarks for this, right? Well yes. But Hot Links takes the concept that little bit further.
To edit a Hot Link, its as easy as 1 2 3:
1. Open the settings application and find “Hot Links”
2. Choose which Hot Link you would like to edit
3. Open Hot Links and your new link is now ready for use!
Opening the app you’ll be faced with an iPhone-esque list layout, listing 7 main social streams in which you most commonly interact. These include: Twitter, Phone, Mail, URLs, Message, Flickr and YouTube. In the iPhone settings tab, under Hot Links, you can configure which accounts, numbers and e-mail addresses these buttons trigger. Meaning, you now have 1 tap access to the most frequent forms of communication, and sites you use on the web.
Extras
As pointed out by the devs themselves, you can also use special URL protocols to open your favourite applications, too. For example.
Not using your custom URL? How about you use it to open your favorite app? Most applications can be opened by a URL that can be used as your custom URL in Hot Links. A few are as follows:
For Facebook:
Open the App: fb://
Your Profile: fb://profile
Requests: fb://requests
Notifications: fb://notifications
Notes: fb://notes
Events: fb://events
News Feed: fb://feed
Friends: fb://friends
Other Apps:
AIM: aim://
Tweetie: tweetie://
Twitteriffic: twitteriffic://
Tap Tap Revenge 2: ttr2cmd://
Lights Off: lightsoff://
BeeJive IM: beejiveim://
ESPN Scorecenter: scorecenter://
iTunes: itms://
And we’re told, this list will be continuously updated by the developers, as they find new iPhone URL schemes. So, stay tuned!
Version 1.1 (Coming Soon)
But the developers aren’t stopping there. In the next update to Hot Links, you’ll see the devs add the ability to open YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr without closing Hot Links, as well as open Facebook profiles in Hot Links.
Now, although the concept for this app is simple (and some might say ingenious), it is lacking slightly. For one, you can’t yet add further services to Hot Links. The services are set, and you can only configure the information for those services. I think if the developers added some sort of ‘Addition’ interface, with the ability to add services other online social services (which are account based), they could be onto a winner.
I’m actually surprised this kind of application has taken this long to rear it’s head. If you think about it, we all use numerous sites a day, yet until now, we’ve had to navigate to each one, whether it be through the bookmarks menu on Mobile Safari, or typing them in manually. Hot links removes the need to open your browser, SMS and Mail application, with one-tap access to configured functionality.
I for one, really like it.
No release date has been divulged to us just yet, however Hot Links has been submitted to the App Store, and is currently in Apple’s approval process. Look out for it hitting sometime soon!
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