Quicker a Useful Android Settings Management App
by Paul Wilks
Oct 21, 2011 2:13 PM –
Install
Quicker is a smooth and useful settings app with some pretty smart concepts. The app essentially lets you create a new set of accessible homescreens that can be filled with a wealth of settings toggles, widgets and app shortcuts. These screens are accessible via your drop-down notification menu and a nifty fast shortcut.
Price: Free, $1.49
Tested on: HTC Desire HD
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Great concept of creating new screens to enclose all your settings requirements.
- Smooth UI.
- Customizable screens.
- Back up settings.
- Ability to create additional app shortcuts.
Cons
- While you can easily swipe from screen to screen, your thumbs often swipes along the settings sliders, adjusting brightness or volume inadvertently.
- Screens are colored Android-keyboard grey, and this cannot be changed.
Features:
Quicker introduces a neat concept in settings management. Basically, the app can create a shortcut in your notification bar that takes you to a sub-set of home screens, especially for your settings. Upon these homescreens you can add toggles, settings widgets and other app shortcuts, in addition to the existing settings sliders for volume and brightness.
The screens pop up simply and deliciously, everything is there as you want it. It’s customizable too so you can add or remove settings important to you. You can move these about, fitting them as you want. If there are particular settings that you never use, you can remove them and fill the space with what is relevant. All this can be done in a very similar way to the way you populate your own Android homescreens.
There are pretty much all the settings you could think of, in addition to other features such as a flashlight and screen lock tool. You then drop these in your screens. All this saves you plenty of space on your usual homescreens but allows for swift access to your settings should you need them.
One minor irritation is the placement of sliders; namely volume and brightness. It’s very easy to inadvertently adjust these as you swipe between the screens as they sit in that band of space you typically swipe over. I’m being a little finickity here but I’m sure others might experience this too. Additionally the color of the screens are that battleship grey we see in the native Android keyboard. While this is fine, the color can’t be changed, which is a slight pity.
I think an especially smart move by the developer here is to also include the ability to add other app shortcuts to the Quicker screens. For example, I added a couple of useful apps such as Barcode Scanner and my anti-virus app. It becomes quite intuitive and helpful as well as functional.
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Quicker – Variety of toggles, sliders and phone info
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Quicker – Add non-Quicker app shortcuts to screens
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Quicker – Blank spaces can be filled with whichever shortcuts, toggle or widget you want
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Quicker – Easy to create widgets and toggles
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Quicker – Easy to use options
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Quicker – Move items around
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Quicker – Various options in deploying widgets
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Quicker – Status bar shortcut settings
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Quicker – Directly links to relevent system info
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Quicker – Preferences
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Quicker – Preferences 2
Usefulness:
Incredibly useful, you can place all your most useful and often used settings right where you want them. It’s cusomizable, intuitive and easy to set up. The ability to create app shortcuts in the screens, makes Quicker additionally useful.
Ease of Use:
The ‘homescreens’ concepts makes the app feel immediately familiar, so it’s just like setting up your own Android homescreens, just here it’s solely for settings.
Frequently Used:
This is obviously dependent on the user, but you can find yourself referring to it regularly as you make small adjustments. For me that tends to be for things like brightness or sounds. It’s easier than navigating to your own Android settings menus so it feel natural to use the app this way.
Interface:
The UI is relatively frill-less and simplistic but looks quite good. Sadly you can’t change the color scheme to fit with your overall phone’s thematic, but this is a minor aside and not really bothersome.