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Launcher Reviews

ADW.Launcher
So, after trying out a few Home Launchers, I have settled upon ADW.Launcher. I must admit, I didn't think anything would be able to replace Helix Launcher, but ADW has all of the speed, eye candy, tweaks, and features that I am loving right now! I also love the feature of Tag Home, which has labels for your different apps when you open the drawer, so I do wish it had that. But aside from that one feature, everything else on ADW OWNS!!!
- It can have up to 7 screens (9 would be great though).
- You can hit nexus style buttons on the bottom to flip to the next screen, instead of sliding with your thumb across the screens (which sometimes hits icons and launches them instead of sliding, I guess because our screens aren't the most sensitive anymore - always happened to me, so I appreciated this navigation option. Does anyone else have this problem? Or needing to swipe a few times to get it to go to the next screen?).
- Since we don't have multitouch, we can't pinch-to-zoom out on our home screen to preview all of our screens. ADW overcomes this via TWO Preview methods:
Method 1: When you hit the home button from any of the screens, or...
Method 2: You can preview JUST the screens to the left or right of whichever screen you are on at the moment, by holding down on the nexus style buttons on the bottom-left or bottom-right, flanking the dock
- The animation of the screens sliding left and right looks awesome.
- You can choose either Galaxy Spica S style navigation of your apps, or the 3-D Fly-In (which I prefer), when you open the drawer. Unfortunately, no option for just sliding the drawer up I don't think.
- You can choose which of your 7 screens (or 5 or 3, whatever) you want to be your "Home" screen (very cool!).
- Customizability:
-you can adjust the speed that you change screens
-you can adjust the "overshoot"
-you can adjust the speed of the Fly-In when opening drawer
-you can adjust the tint of the docked icons
-you can adjust the size of the docked icons
-you can hide the app titles
-you can show or hide the background screens when apps or the app drawer is open, and also adjust the shading of them
-You can customize almost everything!!!
- There are still more features that I haven't discovered yet
I found the creator's thread here, he's an xda member of course
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=645550
And a Youtube video here of many of the customizable features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5gRgpuQE_k
I just installed ADW.Launcher from the Marketplace.
Please feel free to leave your Home Launcher reviews in this thread if you like! Tell us why you have chosen what you have, and which features are particularly important to you and why. Hopefully this will help people or newbies to be able to weed out the less useful or non-working launchers. Maybe I'll start a poll too

Reserved. Just because I've always wanted to be in a position where I can "reserve" posts like devs lol.

Thanks for the post. Id like to see some reviews of the other launchers in this thread.

Launcher Pro is Good As Well. 2.1 only though

thebulletfromhell said:
Launcher Pro is Good As Well. 2.1 only though
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How about a review?

Just tried it out for myself. Great launcher. The only thing I miss from Helix is the double tap to preview. The button isnt super hard though. ill have to make my way to the dev to suggest

blindguyinanorgy said:
Just tried it out for myself. Great launcher. The only thing I miss from Helix is the double tap to preview. The button isnt super hard though. ill have to make my way to the dev to suggest
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which launcher are you talking about? If it's Launcher Pro, then yeah, I agree with you, that's why I went back to Helix, and since then have stuck with ADW. I love the preview!!

helix had preview with double tap on background. preview does rock

How do you feel about Sense 4.0

Seriously, I did not like it on my WinMo5 phone. I still don't like it on my 1X.
cons found so far:
- Launcher crashes when you add a widget too wide for the current screen
- Launcher eats so much memory it crashes randomly (or at least, pressing home gives you a loading spinner for a short while)
- Contacts app looks ancient, froyo style.
- CLOOOOCKS ! Why do they need a dozen clocks, each eating storage for nothing.
- IME is weird. Used smartkeyboard pro before finding the basic ICS one perfect.
- No power toggles in the drawer
- No widgets in the drawer.
- Lock screen seems twitchy, phone tried to call from my pocket this morning.
- Most of the app skins are really ugly compared to ICS' ones (settings, contacts..)
Don't get me wrong, the phone is a real beast. Even with sense obviously cluttering the performance, it's a real breeze, it's really fast as hell. Once we get a clean ICS build, I can only imagine how faster it'll get.

First real user review of Sense 4.0, thanks. I'd have to agree with you on some of these, esp the Contacts/Dialer looks like it hasn't changed at all.

only thing I like about sense is the lockscreen (weather skin is amazing!) and answerscreen
settings menu is also nice now
I hate the launcher.. always changed it, I mean it only looks good with the htc clock but then you only get 2 rows for apps on the homescreen..meh
so yea I wonder why so many people praize sense and it feels odd that htc was the only one who could make a animated lockscreen..

Please tell me what is the point of an animated lockscreen? I really don't like knowing my phone is using juice to show me some nice floating clouds.

Is it even possible for a capacitive touch screen phone to pocket dial unless you've got your hand in there with it?
Sent from my HTC Desire S using XDA

eyecandy mostly I always like seeing that animation, it also gives it a high tech feeling like it's suposed to be
a wow factor for people who grab your phone as well
some care about it.. some don't , I do.

I cannot imagine what you are doing with your phone thats causing so much crashes ... i would suggest looking at your apps and stuff first ...
Of course, most apps are not yet ICS optimized and causes memory issues and what not ... so not necessary that its HTC Sense's fault !!

Crashes are frequent and Sense starts pretty fast, but it's definitely not my apps. Crashed a few time without installing a single thing. Anyway, stable or not, ICS base launcher is way better, IMHO.

I like the new lock screen showing your unread messages but I dont like the email app. The font size is too big even when set to small.
I have a Sensation and there was a smallest setting that worked really well. Its like they made the fonts too large over compensating for the higher resolution of the screen.

I had my One X for 4 days now and I have to say I can't wait to get a rom without Sense. I hope for CM9 since I am coming from a Galaxy S with CM9.
The Lockscreen that launches 4 Apps is the only good thing about sense.

I actually love the look and feel of Sense 4.0, can't agree with you.

ICS builds I tested had ring lockscreen with up to 8 shortcuts.
EDIT: ok, now everytime I hit the "home" button, sense reloads -_-'

I might be wrong but didn't Google say that every phone using ICS should provide an option to the user to use stock launcher..am sure read on some tech blog....I dont have the phone, but if thats the case then in theory u should be able to clear the default setting for sense launcher in settings/apps menu and hopefully then get a prompt to select launcher
either way...do let me know , if this works
Edit :- or else there's always Go Launcher (with ICS theme done by the GOLauncher Team)
Cheers,
M

meletios said:
I might be wrong but didn't Google say that every phone using ICS should provide an option to the user to use stock launcher..am sure read on some tech blog....I dont have the phone, but if thats the case then in theory u should be able to clear the default setting for sense launcher in settings/apps menu and hopefully then get a prompt to select launcher
either way...do let me know , if this works
Cheers,
M
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You wish... You have to use sense AND sense keyboard.
I restored from titanium a MeDroidMod Launcher (looks very ICS-ish to me, don't know what has been modded here) backup from my old N1 sd, and it works. Status bar still sensucks, but at least I have a stable and simple ICS launcher without all the candies. According to the app/running/cached memory usage value, the launcher eats 22Mo where Sense ate 55...

meletios said:
I might be wrong but didn't Google say that every phone using ICS should provide an option to the user to use stock launcher..am sure read on some tech blog....I dont have the phone, but if thats the case then in theory u should be able to clear the default setting for sense launcher in settings/apps menu and hopefully then get a prompt to select launcher
either way...do let me know , if this works
Edit :- or else there's always Go Launcher (with ICS theme done by the GOLauncher Team)
Cheers,
M
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I remember the statement but if it's only to include the launcher then it's pointless
even on stock ics everyone gets nova or apex launcher lol, think they'll have to use the default android skin as well
btw. it only has sense launcher now

As useless Rosie was, it was at least pretty.. sense 4.0 looks like pre ICS stock android, and doesnt seem to be much less bloated.
Thankz god we have XDA, just a pity ure buying a phone knowing you wont be able to fully enjoy as stock.

You are using apex or nova, maybe. But surely not everybody. All the people around me like the stock ics. Why bloat the OS ? For a colored battery bar ?
Sent from my HTC One X using xda premium

ok Sense 4.0 looks great, BUT what happened to the wonderful rotating carousel? Now Sense rotates three screens to the right, then you have to come all the way back to get to screens to the left of the home screen. Surely it would have been easier to let Sense rotate through all the screens, making selection far faster?

I'd like it (the widgets are AWESOME) IF it
- didn't crash all the time
- had 5 rows as an option!!!!!!!
running nova now due to the crashing. Unbelievable how unoptimised it is

If I could have 6 rows instead of 4 I'd use sense launcher instead of nova, i mean we have a 4,7" 720 screen and it's just a big waste of space to have 4x4 grid, and I really don't like the cube style flipping, I feel a bit old for that. I even disable wallpaper scroll. I want it clean and smooth.

[Q] Setting the default homescreen on the One X

Hi,
I'm not sure if this is something really silly and simple that I'm somehow missing, but I'm unable to change the default home screen on the HTC One X. Is this not supported on the stock ROM without installing a 3rd party launcher? I'd really like to be able to change the default homescreen. When I say default, I mean the one the stock launcher takes you to upon pressing home.
I've tried looking all over but haven't found much. I'm guessing the feature exists because when I zoom out of my homescreen, one of the homescreens has a home icon on it, but I don't know how to change it to some other screen.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

have you tried to get all the homescreens on the screen together and just press the one you want and move it around? what i mean you get all 7 of the homescreens together. if you press on one you can move it in the order you want..so you have the homescreen the main one in the middle the one with the home icon well you can move it to the top and that will be like page 1 starting from left to right.. hope that helps

Goku80 said:
have you tried to get all the homescreens on the screen together and just press the one you want and move it around? what i mean you get all 7 of the homescreens together. if you press on one you can move it in the order you want..so you have the homescreen the main one in the middle the one with the home icon well you can move it to the top and that will be like page 1 starting from left to right.. hope that helps
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I understand what you are saying but I think you are misunderstanding his question
if I have 7 screens and say for instance I want to make screen 6 the home screen how does one do that (so that when you press the home button it will go to screen 6 and not to the middle screen [current home icon])
I have searched for this feature as well to no avail

Move all the features that are on screen 6 to screen 1. Duh. You're thinking in reverse. Think forward. Best o luck to ya.
sent from my Evo LTE, usually.

scottspa74 said:
Move all the features that are on screen 6 to screen 1. Duh. You're thinking in reverse. Think forward. Best o luck to ya.
sent from my Evo LTE, usually.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you got it backwards that is alot of PT simple put how do you make another screen the home screen
it was simple with my Moto Milestone you just selected "make this the home screen"
I am thinking this is a limitation in Sense 4.0
not a biggy, but fundamentals are missing

Solution?
I might have a solution. I accidentally changed my home screen so everytime I pushed the Home button on the bottom it went to the wrong screen. The way I fixed mine was doing a restart from the screen I wanted to be the home screen. Once the reboot was complete, my home screen was set correctly.
/update Nope, somehow it randomly got changed again, tried what I thought fixed it above, doesn't work. This is stupid, obviously there is a way to change it, shouldnt be this difficult. I have exactly 9 days to return this phone, I am considering it with all the issues I've had.

I just saw on the SGS3 review that the home screen can be changed easily….
Each screen as an icon on it when in fan view. One is designated as home, to change, just click the icon on the screen you want to be home. Whatever tiles/widgets/apps are on that screen, its still home.
With the One X, you can have any of the 7 screens as home but the tiles/widgets/apps move with the home page (by dragging the home screen around and changing its order)
The only way to do it would change home screen and then manually change all the icons/widgets after
Steve

[Request] HTC Sense Mods - Xposed?

Hey guys, Im currently running Trickdroid on my HTC and im really enjoying the HTC Sense feel. However, there are a few very minor things i thought that might make the experience that much better.
For one, i really like the HTC Sense stock camera; Easy options, Zoe, the seamless switching etc, but i would really like to be able to manually adjust the focus. I found you can change the exposure but i cant find any focus options.
Another thing (very minor) being the Sense "Recent Apps" ( double tap home) , for some reason it doesn't seem to support "multi-touch" and i can only swipe away one app at a time, even if i start from top to bottom. It would be awesome if i could just quickly swipe apps away before waiting for the fading animation to finish.
And lastly, the lockscreen. I do like the simplicity of the stock lockscreen but there's one thing that annoys me occasionally, if i miss tap or don't swipe properly it pops up with a short animation and says "Pull up to unlock" and the screen is unresponsive for the second the animation is happening.
Like i said, these are VERY minor things but having a solution would just complete it.
If you have any suggestions or fixes, they would be greatly appreciated

Possibly through XPOSED Modules?

Bump.......Ideas anyone?

I've never seen anything about anybody else asking about these issues so I would think the chance of a Mod existing or being made is very slim indeed ... You could ask in the Xposed thread ... http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2335241&highlight=xposed ... Maybe the Dev could help you out.

S 10.5 hone screens

Ok just got me one of these crazy things and really love it. . But i have a couple of problems. It comes with 3 hone screens. The first thing I usually do is delete all the stuff of the hone screens so I cam make them my way. Here is my issues
1) there is a home screen with the calendar on it and I cannot seem to remove it. Try dragging it off the screen like ed very thing else bit nope.
2) I down loaded some apps and they went to one of the hone screens. . Didn't want it there so I dragged it off and now the app is nowhere to be seen. It is still installed as when I go to play store it says open. But it is not in apps or downloaded apps (I had to uninstall it and re install it.
3) I tried to create folders and they went into apps instead if the hone screen and I couldn't delete them or move them to the hone screens. Oddly enough when I restarted the tablet this am they were gone. .
Thanks for any help in these matters

1 That is the magazine widget page drag two fingers together on the page and it will go to the edit screen
2 there is an icon which appears at the top of the homescreen when you move an app icon, it says something like 'hide app'. If you have hit that icon you will probably find the app in app manager.
3 create folders in the app drawer then drag them onto the homescreen

So apparently there is a page just for widgets and it cannot be blank.. not sure I like this
No the app was not hidden..I dunno what the deal is
On another note I see no way to add other widgets.. like fancy widgets or any widgets downloaded from play store???
Sent from my SM-T800 using Xparent Purple Tapatalk 2

Press and hold on an empty spot on the homescreen

I was excited to find out what a "hone screen" could be. New uber-flat screen tech perhaps?
This thread was a letdown.

killall said:
Press and hold on an empty spot on the homescreen
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Click to collapse
Well after some playing it appears you csnnot put normal widgets on the widget home screen and you cannot remove all the widgets off the widget screen. . That sucks. So now that widget screen is just going to be wasted. . Why have they made all these changes to normal android. For the first time since running android I guess I'll have to rim a launcher program. . I hate that. Unless someone has a solution to these issues