Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe pocketnow.com a while ago we have a video series called launcher Wars which showed off some of our favorite third-party launchers for android android unlike other os's lets you replace all kinds of stuff you don't like the way your launcher looks and replace it don't like your app drawer that's part of the launcher replace it really neat one of our favorites is called ADW launcher and for a while they just kind of rested on their laurels I mean they were cool and all but there weren't that many improvements or changes until recently and we thought it was worth going back looking at all of the improvements ADW launcher ii x let's get right to it this is ADW launcher ii x the e axe version i don't know exactly what it stands for but i'm going to say it stands for extra you see this is the paid version of the launcher you can get a free version that just doesn't have all the bells and whistles if you decide to try it out definitely try a TWA launcher that's where you're going to find it in the app store or that the place or rather it's written by on der web so there you go you can look it up it's just a few bucks to get up to the e x version and it includes bells and whistles and really neat things try before you buy with the 90 x version and then upgrade if you want to get all the bells and whistles so first and foremost this is my galaxy nexus it's the GSM variety and it's running Android jellybean 4.2 completely stock there's no routing there's no superuser permissions nothing this is stock Android all I've done is installed ADW launcher ii x on top of it now you might be thinking hey Joe that's cool but I don't have android 4.2 so I can't do any of this cool stuff why am I wasting my time watching this video this will work on Android version 1.6 and up so you can get all of this cool stuff all the way back on your g1 think about that really really cool so let's dig in and get started first of all you'll notice we've got basically the same thing we've got our search bar complete with microphone for voice input and this interesting little square e thing up at the top that's actually your app drawer you can get into it really fast that way and then quick access over here to get into settings where you can create a new group of icons you may not have well let's just say you might have bloatware these apps you don't want to see because they came preloaded with your device no problem create a new group for them put all your bloatware in that you only have to look at one icon saves a lot of time when you're looking for whatever to run in your app drawer you can remove the group's set up the group manage all the apps in here and jump into a TW settings which we'll get into in just a minute here so we've got next underneath this is your regular screen you can actually resize the screen if you want a little bit more margin or a little less margin around it really cool feature notice at the bottom you can scroll across it's really quick and you've got your page indicator just like you'd expect you can also get into your apt or the traditional way by hitting the apt or button if you want to change icons in your dock it's pretty simple you long hold and you drag down to the plus sign and it just spreads them out over here so let's go ahead and move a couple of these down here just like that and we'll just go in and we'll put people over here as well so now when I scroll around I've got my app drawer all organized down there it's going to stay there really really nice so lots of settings and settings are really what's all about first and foremost let's create a new folder for these guys tap and hold drag and drop there you go I've got a new folder just like you'd expect with a modern version of Android older versions of Android didn't really have this or didn't have it in the same ease of use again this works all the way back to 1.6 so now you can you can open that up and it's paginate it you can change the order that it sorts in the just lots of cool things you can even change the style if you don't like the way that that preview looks so let's go ahead and look at that come back in here into settings and go into a TW settings now there's so much stuff in here I'm not going to be able to cover it all so don't think that I'm leaving out your favorite part there's just so much we can't cover it entirely let's look at a few of the cool things for example let's go into screen we can change our action bar design that's the one up at the top I've got it set to light right now we can disable it entirely free of that space we can make it transparent or based on the theme yes this is a theme abou launcher so you can change it based on themes that people publish and put out there in the Play Store we can change it to a dark theme or a frame and we'll go ahead and set it to frame just for right now and see what that looks like it does take a minute once you make changes to go back in and and look at that but you can see there's the nice-looking frame now a little bit more traditional with what you'd expect with ice cream sandwich and jellybean back into a TW settings now app drawer you can come in and change the app drawer style one of the cool things that I like is this role I'll show you to roll unball so we'll do that go back home now again it's taking that time to apply all of the changes which this if you want to call it lag that's the only place you're going to really find it is applying these settings in the launcher so go ahead and open that up now and if you look when we scroll now I've got a roll of icons that will flatten back out when I take my finger off the screen so very cool very fast too if you thought that was cool let's go in and show you something even cooler in our app drawer again let's change the style to ball and yes think you know where I'm going with this there's our grid but when we tap and drag it changes into a sphere that we can then flip around and cool functional i I don't know probably not but very very cool icons we can change the icon size you want to bigger you I'm smaller whatever let's make them seventy percent 75 that'll be good we can change the text size let's make that a little bit bigger just going to look really awkward so I'm not recommending you do this change the text color to whatever you want let's say I'm a droid fan so let's go ahead and choose red shadow color we can come in let's make that a little bit of a red as well label color I don't know let's make that a darker grey over here something I guess that works fancy background if you want to enclose the icons inside of a fancy colored background you can like a tile or whatever I don't like it I like them just like that so we'll apply that home twice and you can see all of my icons are now smaller and my text is bigger so I can cram a whole bunch of more stuff on the screen so I've made these changes again I don't like how this looks this is just for illustration purposes you're probably not going to do this but if you want to you could I've thrown a couple of these small icons back out onto the screen again I can change the icon size to pretty much whatever I want this is seventy percent of normal with bigger text than normal so now I've changed the transition on the screens to random just to kind of show you really what I think is the coolest part about this and that's that the transition effect between the screen so okay Joe shut up and just show us okay okay will so we're going to drag it over actually that was a long press another drag and you can see that's just a normal one there's a fade there's a tumble it's kind of a cube but all of these different things and the animation is so fluid and fast and again this is random so each one of these is a completely random selection you can pick which one you like best and and implement that across your entire and your entire experience I'm at a loss for words because come on this this is just cool it's ADW launcher ii x it's available in the Google Play Store you can get the free version or you can get the full ax version with all of the extras which is what i'm showing you right here es has a few of these extra transitions and whatnot you can read about the differences there I like it a lot it's a huge improvement over what we had in the past I'm glad to see on der web starting to do new stuff and bring all this out again I have not even touched the half of what you can do with this so make sure you go and explore and let us know what your favorite feature is down in the comments below showing off really cool launchers that you can use even on your really really old android-powered devices for pocket now I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching