In iPadOS, the old Today View has shuffled over a little, and now lives right on the Home screen. You can pin widgets there, and they will be permanently shown on the left edge of the Home screen (in landscape, at least — in portrait they will act more like a temporary Slide Over panel).

This changes how we use widgets. Instead of being temporary, quick-info panels, or shortcuts for app functions, widgets are now always visible, and always available to tap. A weather widget can be checked with a single glance, for instance. Ditto countdown timers. And — best of all — Shortcuts can be triggered with a single tap.

Let’s take a look at some great widgets for the iPadOS Home screen.

While some apps haven’t quite figured out best use cases for 3D Touch yet, a handful of apps have gotten it right. One of those apps is Launch Center Pro, which lets you choose what apps you get access to through 3D Touch actions.

I’ve chosen to take advantage of this by using Launch Center Pro to launch my most-used media apps: Rdio (RIP, now replaced), Sonos, Music.app and Pandora. By doing this, I’ve freed up four additional spaces on my first Home screen for other apps.

Launch Center Pro has solved many workflow problems for me over the years. Most recently it’s been an immense time-saver when it comes to accessing Google Drive files I need often. While the Google Drive app itself is decent enough, it only acts as a hub to Google’s other apps, which is somewhat annoying.

That’s why I started using Launch Center Pro to speed up the process. Here’s how you can, too.

Today Contrast (formerly called App Cubby and maker of Perfect Weather) released Launch Center Pro 2.0 for iPhone with a new interface and app icon for iOS 7. If you aren’t familiar with Launch Center Pro, here’s the basic rundown: it’s a tool for quickly launching common actions in one place.

Ok, still confused? I’ll let Contrast explain it better:

Ecoute is one of the best third-party music players for iPhone, and it just got a whole lot better thanks to its latest update. In addition to the ability to download missing artwork, it also has new features and supports a new URL scheme that allows it to play nicely with Launch Center Pro.

App Cubby’s popular Launch Center Pro has received its first major update since hitting the App Store last June. In addition to a number of new actions, the version 1.1 update also adds better Text Expander support, a reorganized action composer, and plenty of bug fixes and enhancements.

As we near the end of 2012, Cult of Mac has taken a look back at some of the best iOS apps that have hit the App Store over the last 12 months. There have been some terrific releases this year, and we could have named a hundred that are well worth your hard-earned cash. But we’ve managed to whittle our list down to just ten titles that have really stood out for us this year. Check out our best apps roundup below.

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Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.

Launch Center Pro from App Cubby on Vimeo.

App Cubby has made a little teaser video for the forthcoming new app Launch Center Pro. As you may remember, Launch Center is kind of like Quicksilver or Launchbar for your iPhone — you fire it up and tap buttons to perform actions. You can quickly compose a Tweet, or tap a button to open the Mail app with a new draft already pre-populated with a recipient’s address, or even schedule a message, say, to be sent at a certain time (this will pop up a reminder in the Notification Center).