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The developers behind the popular CyanogenMod version of Android have added a feature that makes it a little faster to launch your favorite apps no matter what you’re doing with your phone or tablet.

You can long-press the home button to bring up shortcuts to up to three different apps.

To use the new shortcuts, download a nightly build of CM10.1 from 3/12/2013 or later, navigate to Settings, open the System area, and scroll down to the bottom until you find “Quick launch shortcuts.”

From there you can drag a small circle to one of three slots and choose an action to associate with that slot.

For instance, you can kill an app, toggle your phone’s ringer, take screenshot, or open Google Now by pressing the home button and dragging your finger to the allocated spot. Or you can open any app installed on your phone.

Note that Quick launch shortcuts may not be available for all device. My HTC One X has hardware buttons for home, back, and recent apps, as well as an option to assign special functions for long-presses (otherwise there’s no way to bring up a menu icon on this phone). So the latest nightly build doesn’t support Quick launch shortcuts. But I was able to try out the new feature on an Amazon Kindle Fire, and it works exactly as promised.

via Taslim Oladoja