Online shoppers want to shop from the comfort of their homes, smartphone users want to access everything from anywhere, anytime with minimum effort and abhor anything that is time consuming and laborious, not to mention repetitive. The era of ' minimalistic approach' is in, and Israel-based app developer Oded Breiner encouraging the trend with his popular app launcher – mrQuery.
You have to give these guys credit for even thinking of something like that. But, with mobile devices becoming an inseparable part of users, Breiner chose to pamper Android (News - Alert) users and by enabling them to access installed apps, favorite contacts and even system settings, directly from the app launcher, using the barest of movements.
Once the app launcher is installed, all users have to do is tap the home-screen, enter just two characters (in the special keyboard that opens) of the app's name, and the app launches. If they want to call a friend, all they have to do is type two letters of their friend's name, and enter text into the search box to send it via a favorite texting app.
And as if typing two characters to launch anything was not fast enough, the launched app is added to the 'history view,' and can hence be accessed even without typing those two letters –' minimalism to the hilt.'
Breiner has good reasons for the introduction of his brainchild. He claims that his app launcher allows for faster app switching than other types of app launchers, texting is made easy, accessing apps easier, and apps can be launched regardless of the state of the device –whether it's on the home screen or not.
"Using mrQuery, no matter what state your phone is in, doing the following steps will always take you to the Gmail app: home button, letter G, letter M. This fact makes it easy to develop instinctive respondent conditioning to what you need to do -- for example, read email," he said.
Breiner based his app launcher on the theory of Pavlovian conditioning, but little would Pavlov have dreamt that his studies on classical learning and conditioning would be applied to mobile device users! Will Pavlov turn in his grave?
Edited by Ryan Sartor