Gadgetory

all right Android lovers what's going on this is Clayton with Android Authority now today I'm going to show you the apex Home Replacement launcher and be showing you version 1.0 dot 5 as well as the pro key beta version that's available for testing now a lot of you may know that this requires Android 4.0 at least or up because this is an Ice Cream Sandwich full replacement launcher so any of your devices running custom roms with Ice Cream Sandwich roms on there can get this launcher and you Galaxy Nexus owners can as well so first off I'll just take you to the apex settings we'll go over some of the basic things having to do with the apex launcher here we have our home screen drawer dock folder behavior advanced backup and restore and then our about an hour restart Apex Launcher so I'll just walk you through some of the simple stuff first I'll actually go into the about Apex Launcher and show you that I'm running the Apex Launcher version 1.0.0 beta now this is basically the same as the 10.5 except for it has a few added functionalities functionalities excuse me which I'll go over so going back I have the home screen settings you can see that we can choose our number of screens and go all the way up to 9 5 -5 because I won't need that many we have our default screen that we can set out of 9 we choose which one we actually want to be our home screen we can disable the grid size so you can kind of just put a I con anywhere we have our number of portrait grid and our number of lands great great icons so we have the functionality to put as many icons as up to 7 here and then as many as up to 7 there and so that leaves for a lot of a squishing but if you have your pixel density changed it will look very nice anyways we have our horizontal horizontal margin which you have options to set all the way from none to large I want a medium simply vertical margin our preview animation here we have our infinite scrolling option which I'll show you right now as I go all the way over through here it just keeps going and it restarts at the right when I scroll all the way to the left you can see my little my track right there goes all the way over anyways back to APEC settings and our home screen settings we have our elastic scrolling which gives a bounce effect like a rubber band when you're scrolling through and our minimum scrolling time can be changed we have all sorts of transition effects now a lot of these are included with the apex Pro beta and not the version 1.0 at 5:00 but a lot of them are so a lot of the cool ones I'll just show you the cross because it's one of my favorites and you just swipe like this and it brings up your other apps in a cross fashion just kind of on a pivot right there 360 degrees of all your apps so that's very cool I like that a lot you will go back into our apex settings and there's just a lot of cool transitions you have your tablet with the glass windows kind of like on the Galaxy Tab or things like that your card stack which is the stock Galaxy Nexus transition cube in cube out accordion overlap wheel I'll show you wheel for a second then we'll get on with the review and this kind of just brings it in like it's on a pinwheel just like that anyways the Galaxy Nexus is powerful enough that it can it can properly render all those transitions in correct time but if you have a phone with maybe a smaller processor you might not want to do some of these crazy transitions I in fact like to just keep it on the tablet um anyways you can show the desktop indicator which is what I was pointing out when I was going through it just shows you which homescreen you're on um home screen indicator position is always on auto on mine at least you can hide your notification bar shadows and icon labels kind of cool for some I know as to our drawer settings we can show hidden app icons because we can disable apps with Ice Cream Sandwich apps sorting our entire title they're sorted by title we have our drawer style excuse me which is how you would scroll through your drawer we have our drawer background transparency meaning we can go all the way down to zero outside of that 48 just for that good for a second here and show you what it would look like now you can see in the background I have my my wallpaper still there instead of all this black stuff so that's pretty cool you can set all the way down to zero so you have a pure transparent app drawer like that anyway so I'll go back to my apex settings I'm gonna have infinite scrolling on the drawer and we can have a primary and secondary apps tab and the secondary apps is sort of like sense where it shows you which apps you have downloaded as well as hide app labels hide widget labels labels excuse me and all sorts of cool stuff like that we have our dock settings where we can choose our number of dock pages and number of dock icons and as well as infinite scrolling and just the same thing as pens a lot of the home screen options like that so that's what this would look like is you can go through like this and have multiple ones of those so back to our apex settings we have our folder settings which I will show you super quick that I have square folders like that with sort of a fan preview so it's not the stock Ice Cream Sandwich looked and feel to that I will show you how I got that right now going to folder settings you can go to folder preview and select stack and grid or the iOS style I like fan and then you can choose the folder background and I chose square you can also choose iOS ring or none or a custom one you can choose from your gallery but I like the square hidden folder name and hidden icon name basically you have your behavior settings which is gesture support pinch in swipe up swipe down two fingers swipe two finger swipe down desktop DoubleTap just to talk long press draw button feedback all sorts of different stuff you can do with that anyways you have your advanced settings which allows you to choose SMS count unread SMS count unread miss excuse me miss call count under a gmail count so a lot of cool stuff like that as you can see here it is uh letting me know that I have a text and if I were to have a missed call it would display that here and if I were to have a missed Gmail or another miss but an unread Gmail it would be right here anyways coming back to the apex settings we have our backup and restore options to restore our profiles on the Apex Launcher and we have our about Apex Launcher Pro now you can see here that we can check out a lot of the features within the apex launcher pro this is basically just a quick overview of what you have with the pro license version here's a small demo of what our unread count would look like and all of our gestures of course we can pinch in sort of like sense to show our preview and we also can have one by one widgets here in the dock bar you see I have my beautiful widget for weather this is what it would look like if it was out just grab it drag it down to the dock bar and there it is I have another icon in there but a lot of the widgets are poorly formatted when you were to put them in the dock bar so for example I will go here and I will choose a beautiful widget and I will do a toggle widget make it for Wi-Fi for the heck of it and as you see here I would bring it down and then we sort of have just a little cutoff like that but mind you this is the beta version so I'm assuming that that's going to be fixed and we possibly will see even larger widgets available for the dock bar such as a four by four four by one excuse me widget down there and that would be cool so anyways guys that was the Apex Launcher go ahead and check it out today you can get it from the Play Store or a lot of custom roms come with it already also to get your free evaluation version of the beta Apex Launcher you would go to your apex settings then you would go to your about Apex Launcher it might not say Pro at this time and you can check automatically check for updates and you will want to press beta version because if you're choosing the stable version it will not give you the option of testing the new beta and then you can check for an update now and it will tell you that you have the most up-to-date but you can choose the evaluation version for the beta Pro now anyways guys I hope you liked the review keep checking android authority comm and answered authorities youtube channel for more app reviews and rom reviews and everything of the sort so catch you later guys