by Even if you’ve mastered the four-finger gesture and learned to use Spotlight search and multitasking like a pro, shortcuts on the iPad are a far cry from the ones we use on our Macs. When it was released in mid-2012 for the iPhone, Launch Center Pro promised a better way to navigate between apps, utilizing URL schemes to unlock the hidden shortcuts our favorite apps already use to make calling, texting, and emailing seem so seamless.
Now that Launch Center Pro has arrived on the iPad, we can finally unleash its full power. With a familiar interface and a tremendous library of supported apps, the productivity app feels right at home on the larger screen, even if it doesn’t always take advantage of it.
Users of Launch Center Pro for iPhone will need no introduction to the new iPad incarnation — so much so that they might think they’re using a scaled-up version. A familiar grid of squares is ready to record your shortcuts, and it all works exactly as it does on the smaller screen, with the same built-in Action Composer making it just as easy to customize your screen. Dropbox syncing lets you import any actions or groups you’ve created on your iPhone, though its usefulness is hit-or-miss due to differences in URL schemes between the two types of apps. Like the iPhone version, you can choose to replace Apple’s keyboard with Fleksy’s excellent alternative for any action that requires typing.
Launch Center Pro makes itself very comfortable on the larger and more powerful iPad, but we would have liked it to utilize the extra real estate more fully. Its 20-square grid adds room for just five extra actions over its iPhone counterpart —
