Gadgetory

hey guys its Jill with pocket now one of the cool things that we like about android-powered devices the ability to change the way they look the way they operate the way they feel just by installing a replacement launcher app now it's just as easy as installing any other app but this one changes the way it looks and feels on your home screens and whatnot there are two out there in the forefront ADW launcher and launcherpro both are undergoing entire total rewrites this is the first look that we've got at what ADW launcher is doing with their rewrite let's go take a look okay the first thing that you're going to notice is the fact that this doesn't look like anything different and it's not supposed to ADW launcher is one of those launchers that's supposed to look like and function as a replacement for the stock android launcher and they do a really good job a couple things that you'll notice right off the bat and this is where the bulk of the changes come into play you know what before I show you that let me show you the settings just to let you know this is a very early what is being called a beta but it really should be called more a technology preview so if you look over here we've got the looping home strains like we've had in the past where if you go to the end and that's the end of the the screens you can flip it again and it will go to the next one or loop around to the other side in the app drawer you can sort either by name or by the times that you've launched it so kind of the most frequently used applications are going to bubble to the top which is nice but I'd like to be able to change this in the app drawer itself rather than in a setting again this might not be the way that it is in the final release but it's nice to see that more commonly you stuff are going to be bubbled together if you so desire coming down we've got a swipe up action when you swipe up on your screen it can do any one of these things if you swipe down it can do any one of these things which it's the same list but you can now have two different functions just by swiping up or swiping down on the home screen and that's it there no more settings now if you're familiar with ADW launcher you know that there are tons and tons and tons of settings this one there are not including screen animation settings and whatnot or transitions between the home screens the reason for that is this is still very very early in development but it's more a proof of concept to show you what has been done so that's the settings you can't do a lot here's that screen transition that I was telling me about just a simple swipe from side to side and then of the rotation or the scale and pop and what not like we've had in the past also I can't come in and customize my doc I long press and I can get my thumbnails but I can't customize my dock icons or navigate through like I have in the past now a side note here you'll notice that i have my my taskbar if you will my system tray down here at the bottom that's a feature of cyanogenmod 7 not related to to the launcher app but let's get back to the launcher so what does this launcher have well if we come in there's your app drawer I can't change the speed at which it fades in and out which kind of makes it feel a little bit slow even though it's not so I'd like to somehow have a way to customize the speed to try and speed that up a bit there is not a any kind of pagination in the drawer which I wish there were but again you'll have that most frequently used stuff up at the top if you show decide to to configure it that way but what do you have okay here I've got gmail right if I long press on gmail now you'll see I have this new context sensitive little bubble that pops up that lets me either remove this from the home screen edit it so if I don't want to call it gmail if I want to call it something else or even assign a different icon I can do that through the edit feature just like that if I want to get the application info this is really handy and this alone makes it worthwhile if I want to find out all I want to about this I want to move it to the SD card which you don't want to do with gmail by the way or stop uninstall it see what the cash is what the the defaults are for it I can go ahead and do that right here I don't have to go into settings like settings and down to wherever it went applications manage applications scroll down here try and find gmail where is gmail right there open it up I don't have to do that anymore instead all I have to do is long press and info right there like that similarly if I want to find out more about it in the market I can simply tap and it will take me right to that apps instance in the market so I can see if there are any updates you can see who it's by I can even go in and look at other look come on allow automatic updating I want to see what's related I want to see other apps written by the same developer all right there because I've had that long press context now on the homepage and of course we have share if I want to be able to share this with anyone of my shareable apps and this is going to be different depending on your device for example I have facebook and this IP webcam app installed so I have those showing up my twitter app is plume so it's going to let me share by ploom whatnot I don't know how it's going to share it but okay it's just sharing the market link in this case but still very cool I've been using this as my daily driver for the last couple days and it's it's nice it does what it's supposed to and nothing else it is still an early beta but it shows us a little hint at what the revamped version of ADW launcher is going to be like hopefully in the near future there is no ETA or release date yet this is just kind of the developer getting out there into the community so you guys can test it play with it see what you like suit you don't like report any errors that you come across to help the development process along still very cool it's a step in the right direction and I like it a lot we'll try and keep you posted with any updates that they have to the beta but we'll definitely let you know about the actual release of the the new version of the app because that's what we do if you want to try out this he's calling it a beta so we will too if you want to try out adw.launcher beta you can go ahead and do that head over to pocketnow.com and i will give you a link to the APK sorry Lu AT&T folk you have to be able to sideload apps to be able to run this that's one of the reasons why we give you these in-depth videos but still very cool very neat showing off new beta launchers for pocket now I'm Jolie by hmm