FastStatus - Quick Compose Options for iOS

iOS 5 brought us Twitter integration, iMessage, and better e-mail. Even in doing so, Apple didn’t make it any simpler to compose any of these functions. Instead, we still find ourselves fumbling around for the right application we have to have open in order to get started with what we need to compose. Is this a problem? — We think so. Enter FastStatus, a new free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer VincenzoBB that permits us to rapidly compose an e-mail, SMS, or Tweet.

FastStatus is an amazingly simple jailbreak tweak that depends on the installation of Activator to use its capabilities. The preferences for FastStatus are as shallow as a small puddle – encompassing nothing except for the ability to indicate your Activator action that you will invoke to use FastStatus. The settings are presented in the screenshot below:


After invoking your Activator action, a prompt appears on your screen asking you what you are going to do. There are four buttons in total – Mail, SMS, Twitter, and Cancel. The Mail option recognizes only the Mail application for composing your e-mails, the SMS option only recognizes the Messages application for composing your iMessages and text messages, and the Twitter option recognizes the Twitter application but unfortunately doesn’t support iOS 5’s integrated Twitter interface. FastStatus works on the home screen, within applications, and on the lock screen.

While FastStatus has good intentions, it could have been implemented much better. Instead of requiring the Twitter application to compose a Tweet, it could have used the iOS 5 Twitter interface the same way that Activator does natively already. Additionally, it requires that all of the applications corresponding to their commands be launched at the time you tap their compose buttons. This means that you have to wait a while until the whole application loads up before you can actually compose something. Messages+ is a good example of how quick-composition for text messaging should be – bringing up its own interface without the need to wait for an application to load up.

FastStatus is compatible with iOS 5 on the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. There are no new icons added to the home screen. We cross our fingers and hope that this tweak sees some fine-tuning in the future, as it seems to be showing a rough maiden voyage. I feel like I could actually open an application faster than invoking FastStatus and then waiting for it to launch the application for me.