Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and not long ago I showed you a really cool launcher app called launcherpro now back then it was in version 0.5 beta let me tell you it's come a long way let's go take a look at some of the new features okay this is my android it's a nexus one running android 2.2 and what I've got running here is the launcher pro app now a launcher app is basically everything you see here it's all of your icons it's the ability to have wallpaper in this case a live wallpaper your shortcuts over here and then your app drawer all of that is your launcher now there are lots of launchers that you can get just go to the marketplace and search for launcher in fact you should be able to find launcher pro available for free in the market as long as you're running android two points somewhere now i don't want to go over everything this launcher does so i'm just going to hit on three things just to try and keep this video at a reasonable length so the first thing i want to show you is scrollable widgets now you're familiar with widgets they're informational areas of the screen here's a news widget that rotates through some news items here's a clock and weather widget as well the time and the weather and then my pure calendar widget which if you look right here it's got a few days worth of calendar information on it now your calendar has a lot more information than just a few days but when you combine an advanced launcher like launcher pro or ADW launcher which is just another launcher app along with apps a ridgid rather that are scrolling aware you can scroll the information in your widgets so in this case i can scroll through a whole bunch of calendar items just at the flick of my finger without having to wait for my calendar app to open so that's really cool really nice again you've got to have a launcher that supports it and you have to have a widget that supports it and turn on that ability in both of them a little bit complicated but I'm sure you can figure it out next I want to show you let's scoot back over here to this screen I want to show you my shortcut bar fact let me rotate my phone up this way and zoom in a bit now this is just basically where your where your doc lives and up until recently you've had your launcher Trey if you will just a little little grabber that you'd grab on Android 1.5 and six and pull it up to view your app drawer in later versions you know you don't have to pull it up you just tap on it and it opens but what you'll notice here is I've got a whole bunch of icons on either side of it two on each side and these icons are configurable you can set them to be whatever you want but what i want to show you here is i can scroll side to side and get a whole new set of shortcuts so i can put my most frequently used apps down there and this will let me rotate all the way through or i can go to side to side it's just a loop through so that's really cool you can add any number of stuff down here to your otherwise unused space now froyo help to occupy that space a little bit over here on the sides it had screen indicators to let you know which home screen you were on just in case you got lost because you can have a whole bunch of homescreens now so that would say you know there's four screens over that way there's another two screens that way and you're on the middle one you know or whatever well this will let you do that as well you can set this icon and this icon or really any icons for that matter to be a screen indicator just like on froyo but you know I don't like that I know pretty much what screen I'm on and I can always view all of my screens all at once which I showed you in my last video so I just occupy those with frequently used things so that's cool and it's feature number two feature number three is really where this starts to shine it's the only launcher app that I've seen do this so far you'll notice my gmail icon over here has a little red one next to it or a one in a red circle now what that's telling me is I have one unread gmail item if I had any missed phone calls I'd have a little indicator over here telling me how many missed calls I had there and if I were using the stock messaging app for my text messages I could have the same thing to show me how many text messages I have waiting now i use google voice and there isn't a shortcut icon that has that feature built-in yet though I do have a feature request put in with the developer to let me do that so that's really neat you can see at a glance hey I've got this many things of this type to look at and I can prioritize what I do now right now you're thinking but Joe we've got this entire area of the screen which is devoted to nothing but you know what notifications they call it a notification bar you can grab on it and drag it down and check and see what notifications you have and yes you're right but let me show you what you can do let's go in here to the menu and I'm going to zoom back out a bit so we can see a little bit more of the screen here we're going to go into the preferences and then the preferences we're going to go into the appearance settings now first thing you'll notice is over the last version we have a lot better organization of all of the configuration settings I really really like this let's go right into it you'll notice here we can hide the notification bar so let's go ahead and check that and let's go back home and you'll notice now up on the top if I can actually press the home button I no longer have that notification bar up on top now there's a lot of stuff that the doc doesn't show that was up there but you know there might be widgets that you have on your home screen that show you that information that show you you know if you're on Wi-Fi or if you're on 3G or whatnot so there's stuff that can replace that if if you've got it there so you don't have to have redundant information which I really like but one other thing is I've noticed that in some of the apps that I use I'm starting to see some burn in at the top of my screen of that notification dock because it's it's a white area with black text so it's really high contrast and I am just like in the old CRTs I'm starting to see some burn in you can't see it here and it's really not a big deal but if you want it to get that that possibility of burn in just out of your mind just for peace of mind you can do something like that and of course if you decide you know I don't like it that way and I want it back you can go back into your preferences and unhide the notification bar and there you go it's back there for you so there tons and tons and tons of other things that have been put into this app since I showed you the previous video but if I were to show you and we're already looking at a seven-minute video here and you guys have already told me that's a long video to show you anything more we'd be looking at a really long video so I'm going to turn you loose and let you go out to the market search for launcherpro all onward download and install it it's free so you don't have to worry about it and try it out if you like it great go ahead and start using it start exploring and tell me what your favorite new feature is that you found just put that in the comments to this video or to the comments of the video or the comments of the article and let me know what you think you can always switch back if you don't like it just uninstall it and you're back to your stock launcher and tell me what you think do you like the app are the things that you like that aren't included and if so what and of course if you like this kind of video give it a thumbs up if you aren't already subscribed to our video channel you really owe it to yourself to do that for all kinds of reasons I'm not going to go into it because I'm out of time and then of course share this with your friends on Twitter and on Facebook if you have any questions at all leave me comments below i'm joe at 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