App Review - Quick Settings

Today I want to talk about a Settings-type app that really impressed me. This is Quick Settings from Sergej Shafarenka. It presents a simple UI to quickly change the brightness, volume, and various battery draining services such as bluetooth and wi-fi. For most people, a settings app is not a high priority because your phone comes with useful widgets for toggling bluetooth, wifi, etc., However, Quick Settings is so well designed and polished, I would recommend downloading it*.

Walkthrough

Quick Settings

The default list of settings are the ones I tend to use most, and they are: brightness; volume; WI-FI, GPS, and the bluetooth toggle. The top right hand corner features a flashlight and a shortcut to the battery use indicator.

The Battery Indicator

The top left is a screen brightness slider: Slide all the way to the left for minimal brightness, and all the way to the right for full brightness, and the icons on the left and right are convenient shortcuts for min and max. The toggle to the right of it, enable or disable the auto-brightness feature.

Auto Brightness Enabled (the right-most toggle = "ON")

Touch the "Volume control" and you will be shown the list of available volume options for your phone. Finding this was my "this is awesome" moment.

Most optons (toggles) are fairly obvious. But you might ask, "What is APN control?" Here's a nice bonus - Sergei has a wiki page on it.

Who and why might need APN control?

• Who: anyone with a GSM (not CDMA) phone which does not have a native switch for data connection activation and inactivation. Normally these are phones running prior Android 2.2 version with no Sense UI (like my old HTC Magic).
• Why: because you don't want to pay for data traffic all the time and you want to have a possibility to switch data connection off even if there is no such possibility in the phone itself.

When do I not need to use this control?

• If your phone has native data switch available via system properties or as a widget
• If you have a CDMA phone
• If you have problems with this control

My wife and I are on a CDMA network, so this control is not necessary for me. So I decided to remove it. Quick Settings allows you to customize what settings are visible. Just open up the app's menu and you will see 2 menu items: Customize and Preferences. Touch "Customize".

The "Customize" page

The customize page needs a little bit of explanation. On the right-most side of each option is a "slider" icon. Touch the slider icon and slide up and down to adjust the ordering of the setting on the settings page. If you slide it down past the "Hidden Settings" separator, then the setting will no longer be visible on the settings page.

There are a number of hidden toggles you can add to the settings page. For me, my settings page contains the following: Brightness, volume, ringer (quick toggle to put phone into silence mode for meetings), bluetooth, WI-FI, GPS, auto-sync (disable during meetings or when I go to bed).

The menu item in Quick Setting's option menu is the Preferences page, which will look familiar to every Android user.

Here you can change the Full screen/Dialog look and feel (Appearance). The dialog mode has a nice look to it, but I stuck with the more functioanl Full screen mode. The status bar option lets you access Quick Settings via Android's notification bar at the top:

Adds a Quick Settings icon to the top notification area.

However, I find it to be more cumbersome to access Quick Settings via notification. It is worth putting a shortcut to Quick Settings on your primary home screen instead.

You can choose to enable the LED flashlight. You will be shown a warning in this case. I appreciated seeing this warning - I did not know the LEDs on these phone can be fragile.

Comparison

I'll compare Quick Settings to one other settings-type app I've used before - MySettings from JQSoft. I first read about this app via an App Surgery post from an Android Developer Advocate at Google. When I looked at MySettings I've found it didn't add bring a lot to the table other than a quick way to access screen brightness. Yes, it had access to a bunch of other things like WI-FI, bluetooth, etc., but I thought the toggle widgets that came with the phone were more convenient to use. The UI on Quick Settings looks better and cleaner to me, the ability to customize is a big win, and the centralized volume control is what made me want to keep Quick Settings in the first place. At the end of the day, Quick Settings feels like an app where the developer(s) put a lot of time and effort into giving it Quality - that means a lot to me.

It would also make sense to compare Quick Settings to the default toggles on the phone. Here I will the list of the toggle widgets that came with the Droid X.

On top, the Droid X toggles

First, I just want to say that the 5 toggle widgets in the screenshot just disappeared for a second and re-added themselves as I was typing this. I've seen this happen a couple of times before and I think this is a problem with Motorola's code - I've never seen this on the HTC Droid Incredible. Second, while the same set of toggles on the Incredible are responsive and easy to use - the Motorla version feels clumsy. The look and feel of Motorola's hints that you would swipe up/down at the widgets to toggle on and off - in reality you are only suppose to tap them - ugh, this is bad UI.

What's nice about toggle widgets is that you can turn things on and off without opening up an settings app first, but a combination of clumsy widgets from Motorla and all the features in the Quick Settings app really makes me prefer the app over the widgets; your mileage may vary.

Summary

Before you install Quick Settings, think about whether the native widgets would do well enough for you. For most people it might not be a necessity. However, Quick Settings has a wide range of customizable features and is quite polished. It is definitely worth checking out.


* - Bias warning - I am a big fan of the Open Source philosophy, so Quick Settings probably gets bonus points for being Open Source.