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New App Turns Bluetooth On and Off With One Touch

aristotle said:
Or just leave your doors unlocked at your house and twitter that you are leaving for the weekend. ;)

"Jail" "break" mean that you are "breaking" the BSD "jails" that protect your phone from third party apps running amok. You are effectively turning your security into swiss cheese.
Click to expand...

While, potentially, it's indeed a security risk, an app indeed running amok still remains to be seen.

I've long been jailbreaking on several of my numerous iOS devices and have always been installing tons of Cydia stuff (even ones without dependable references / reviews). No problems / viruses / trojans encountered.
 
New App Allow File Transfer over Bluetooth With One Touch. Now that's news for iPhone!! :D
 
Apple could do something like this.
Tap on the menu bar and then a screen shows up with a connectivity Icon similar like the one below.
Then slide left, down or right to toggle Bluetooth, Wireless or Network(3G-LTE) on or off and it would show a small colored Icon to show it's status.
Could add another for airplane mode, slide up to toggle on or off.

It's just a quick Photoshop and Apple would off course do a much better job then Me.

Why is it that on most if not all Mobile phones it's tucked away to far to toggle on or off, hell I even had a phone which still downloaded from 3G even when I switched it off.
Do they do this deliberately so you use more data from the providers, more money for them?
 

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iSee said:
It's not really "much" simpler. I guess we're assuming starting from the home screen with the setting or this app visible. So the options are:

iOS Settings:
Settings --> General --> Bluetooth --> on/off
This app (auto-toggle feature off)
App --> on/off
This app (auto-toggle feature on)
App

But Settings remembers my last location, so if I most recently toggled bluetooth then its just:
Settings --> on/off

So it's just a one tap difference... that is simpler... but only a little simpler. ;)
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Get your dumb@ss fanboy negative rating click fingers ready everyone! :p

Jailbroken iPhone. Press both volume buttons at the same time, instant wifi hotspot. Double click power button, straight to phone keypad.

And before you typically jump and say "that has nothing to do with bluetooth meh meh meh!" you can assign anything to those activations and create other activation modes.

Or just a quick swipe at the top of the screen to bring up SBSettings.

Jailbreaking can be 100% legit.
 
Are we really at a point in life where tapping your screen 4 times is considering "too much"?

I personally have my BT off 90% of the time anyway so this isn't really a big deal for me personally.
 
Had this on my Android phone for years. They're called widgets in the droid world. Also have them for one touch silencing phone, turning on wifi, changing screen brightness, detailing battery usage among other things.

One of my favorite widgets is Traffic. I enter a route, point A to point B and name it, say work. And when I open my phone I simply press it and the icon is a traffic light - green for all clear and red for problems. If it's red I tap it and it opens to Google maps showing where the congestion is. I can then use voice command to ask it to reroute me.

Apple is quick to jump on others accusing them of ripping off their ideas, but they would be well served to take a good look at how far ahead the competition really is. They've already borrowed notification screen and lockscreen from Android. And the new Mountain Lion will be borrowing Android's style sheets, but they really need to take a look at how versatile widgets are and employ them on the iPhone.
 
MacRumors said:
[url=http://cdn.macrumors.com/im/macrumorsthreadlogodarkd.png]Image[/url]


Image

A frequent complaint amongst some iPhone power users is the number of steps it takes to toggle Bluetooth on and off. It takes the user four steps -- Settings/General/Bluetooth/Toggle -- to turn it on or off. However, a just-launched app aims to make the task much simpler.

Bluetooth OnOff launched last night and enables the toggling of Bluetooth with just a tap -- or even, via a blank toggle, simply by launching the app. To do this, head to the app's settings panel in Settings and toggle the unlabeled switch there, kill the app through the multitasking tray and relaunch it.

It's a universal app, for iPhone and iPad -- however, this sort of direct control of Bluetooth is prohibited by Apple's iOS app guidelines and it's unclear how long Apple will allow the app to remain on the App Store.

Bluetooth OnOff is $0.99 on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Article Link: New App Turns Bluetooth On and Off With One Touch
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Sad Android has had these widgets/buttons since day one.
 
No thank you for $.99. I don't use it enough. I'll wait for Apple to incorporate into iOS.

I would like to see iOS add a new settings that allows users to choose which on/off settings they would like to have access to in the Notification Center (NC). Then you could just swipe down the NC and quickly toggle the on/off settings you have asked to be displayed.

Thinking about it; I would like a lot more out of the NC.
* 3rd Party Widgets => ability for devs to add widgets to the NC
* Multitasking => Swipe to the right to get a full-screen list of "open" apps. Either hold to wiggle to close or some new way like swiping the icons off the multitasking screen. Swipe left to return to notifications.
* Easier dismissal of notifications => the little 'x' is hard to tap. Need a new way of dismissing. Not sure what would be best. Maybe hold hold and swipe of to the left.
 
Ok, so it gets pulled, but it's obviously a good idea for some users.

I've often thought that there could be a "profiles" app or something similar that lets you save your settings, perhaps to an icon on the home screen.
Save your phone's configuration for:
Night (silent/low brightness etc.)
Day...
Home/work/
bluetooth/wifi/airplane..
and so on...

You would have the choice to jump to your different setting via saved "apps" - bung em all in a folder and you're good to go.

I've said too much.
 
This app doesn't help with BT speakers, you still have to dig down to the BT menu to connect.

Mike
 
I've suggested this to Apple via the feedback web page but Bluetooth settings should work similar to tethering and VPN whereby before enabling/setting them up they are buried in the settings->general->networking area. After setting up they are a top level item so it's just settings->personal hotspot, or settings->VPN.

Then only the people that use Bluetooth have easy access while it doesn't clutter the menu of those that don't.
 
eznoh said:
This app doesn't help with BT speakers, you still have to dig down to the BT menu to connect.

Mike
Click to expand...

I got it to work, you have to go into general settings and set the app "on", this
makes it act as a toggle. I also had to restart to get it to work.

Mike
 
Maybe this will give a kick to Apple to get off their buts and actually make these settings usable. Wifi and bluetooth should be as easy to toggle as putting the phone on silent (almost). Maybe they will just steal the idea like the volume up camera click that they banned. "you cant do that, its against the rules" "oh look at this great idea we just had, we'll change the rules so its allowed because its our idea" I don't mind them integrating it or even not allowing it before because it was against their rules but if your going to take an idea then give credit where credit is due at least.
 
morespce54 said:
Wasn't there a trick, a while back, about "bookmarking" (or emailing, I can't remember) an iOS Pref pane shortcut?
Click to expand...

Yes, it’s been mentioned several times in this thread, I posted a link to the site where you can create the shortcuts, and more than one person has indicated that trick is not compatible with iOS 5.1 :)
 
LordJohnWhorfin said:
1. Leave it on.
2. Leave it on.
3. No, its drain on battery is negligible. Leave it on.
4. Do you care to substantiate this statement with serious references? Or did you just read it on the internet?

So, the use case is simple: LEAVE THE FRICKING THING ON!
Click to expand...

Don't tell me how to use my device. My business relies on using my phone extensively and every bit of battery counts. I also waste ALOT of time switching bluetooth on and off.

This is the one feature that I have been waiting for from Apple for a long time.
 
Being able to quickly toggle Bluetooth is useful because:

Say you have a bluetooth headset that is paired with both your iPhone and Mac. You use it frequently with one or the other. The headset will automatically try to pair with either device when you turn it on; the only way to control which device it pairs with is to turn off Bluetooth on the device you don't want to use it on.

The bluetooth protocol probably could be designed better, to allow you to specify what to pair with... but it's not, so we have to deal with these kludges.
 
If it is indeed accessing a private API then it will get pulled when Apple realizes this. Quite how it got though the approval process is interesting, as this kind of thing is picked up. However, there could be ways to access a private api in such a way that it would not get picked up by Apple's scan, may that is what happened here?

I will agree that the functionality it provides is something I think iOS needs.
I'm still on 5.0.1 and so I use the prefs:root=General&path=Bluetooth web clip thing to gain direct access to the Bluetooth setting panel. Alas Apple blocked this in 5.1, and so I have to go through quite a few taps to get to the setting.

I typically have Bluetooth disabled and only enable it when I get into my car which has a handsfree setup. So I need to launch settings, go to BT, enable it. I would much rather have the ability to either tap one button to turn it on / off, or one button to go into the BT settings pref pane.

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morespce54 said:
Wasn't there a trick, a while back, about "bookmarking" (or emailing, I can't remember) an iOS Pref pane shortcut?
Click to expand...
Yup:
prefs:root=General&path=Bluetooth

Seems to only work for iOS 5.0 - 5.0.1, it's been disabled in 5.1, and did not work in prior OS versions, though I have a feeling in iOS 2.x there was a similar kind of method to access prefs.
 
Oh, nice, quickly, let me download this. There should be a quick toggle bar in iOS just like in android though.
 
If something so obviously a no-no like bluetooth control got past Apple, doesn't it make you worry it could also be malicious in some way? Don't want to sound paranoid - it probably isn't. But still... I don't feel so secure any more.
 
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