Any Cut for Android Review: Create Shortcuts for Files, or Functions
Any Cut is a useful little application for Google Android that lets you create a shortcut on your home screen for almost any function your phone has to offer.
Using Any Cut (5 out of 5)
When you load up Any Cut, the first thing you need to do is select what you need to create a shortcut for. On Any Cut’s home screen, you’ll see four options: Direct Call, Direct Text Message, Activity, and Make Your Own. Selecting any one of these will lead you through a process to create a shortcut.
When you select Direct Call or Direct Text Message, Any Cut takes you to your contacts book. There, you can select the name of the person you want, and Any Cut will place a shortcut by that name on your home screen. When you click on that shortcut, Any Cut will either call that person, or compose a text message to that person, depending on what you told it to do.
Most of Any Cut’s convenience factor lies in the ‘Activity’ tab, though. When you select Activity from the Any Cut home page, Any Cut brings up a whole list of the applications and functions on your phone. I found that most of my apps were shown in the list, although Any Cut left out some of the smaller ones. I like the fact that not only does Any Cut display the apps themselves, it also displays some of the functions in the app. Once you select the activity you would like to create a shortcut for, Any Cut automatically places an icon for that function on your desktop.
In the Make My Own tab, you can create a shortcut to pretty much anything in your phone. The Make Your Own tab requires some coding knowledge, so if you’re not a coding expert, I’d stick to the ‘Activity’ tab in this app.
How it Helps (5 out of 5)
I thought Any Cut was one of the best apps I’ve seen so far. I found the Direct Text Message and Direct Call shortcuts very handy, because I usually have to dig through my contacts ten or twenty times a day, looking for the same person. With the shortcuts on my home screen, I saved a lot of time.
One of the things I didn’t like about Any Cut was that you can’t assign an icon or picture to any shortcut. This made everything a little confusing, because after twenty minutes of using Any Cut, I had a ton of shortcuts littering my home screen, and it was kind of hard to navigate through all that. Also, I found that when you create a shortcut to any app, it takes a while to start up. But that was a small price to pay for the time and headaches Any Cut saves you.
The Bottom Line
Any Cut is a free and enormously functional app that will save you tons of time. The Direct Text Message and Direct Call features are life-savers, especially if you need to make repeated phone calls to someone. Any Cut is a wonderful app that will leave you wondering how you ever survived without it.
References
Android Market, https://market.android.com/details?id=com.appdroid.anycut
