Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe the android guy in the past I've shown you an awful lot of custom roms roms that aren't distributed by the big name brand manufacturers HTC Samsung and the like well my favorite one has been cyanogenmod today i want to show you aokp and it's full of pink unicorns let's go take a look so this is my samsung galaxy nexus the GSM variety we'll go ahead and turn it on here and you'll notice first of all I wasn't kidding about pink unicorns it does have a rainbow mane I don't know if that's a redeeming quality or not but there you have it it's a traditional typical lock screen with a few cool additions first of all we do have the date and time we have the battery in percentage which is cool and then we've got the weather up here where it says where I'm located what the temperature is and what the weather's like right now Syracuse 48 degrees Fahrenheit and it is fair this can also show you your calendar events upcoming right down in here as well I haven't wired up a calendar to show that to you but it's got that capability now down here in the bottom you'll notice we've also got our little circle unlocked we can automatically launch the camera app or unlock the phone right there so we'll go ahead and unlock then do that quite fast enough go ahead and unlock that and over here let's take a look that was a bug report from a previous take by the way this is still kind of buggy and before we get too deep into it this is the AOKP that android open kang project you can look up tang there are lots of definitions basically it's making something work on something that it wasn't really designed to do for example a cyanogenmod rom might be able to be Kang into a t-mobile g1 I doubt it but that would be an example of what a king is so that's what these guys are doing their they're hanging this rom and this rum is based on the AOSP so let's take a look first of all up here at top we've got a battery percentage which is really kind of cool seventy-nine percent down here you can see my transition really kind of cool but before we go into that let's take a look down here now down on the bottom you'll notice well what is that that's a phone icon and that's a search icon down here in my navigation bar how on earth can that be well it's really kind of cool and I can customize these I can make them whatever I want I can I mean even apps and i can add stuff remove stuff i can have three I can have one I can have five really really cool I can long press on search and get my speak now stuff that I haven't had before because you know that search button has been gone so now my voice actions are a lot easier to get to and I don't have my persistent search bar across the top so really kind of cool there so we actually have two things working together we have nova launcher and this is the nova launcher that comes with the ROM it's actually been updated through a market update since then and then we've got the actual AOKP custom rom itself you do have to be routed to install this it installs just like any other wrong you've got rom manager you can install that from you've got your your custom recovery in this case clockworkmod that i flashed it from you do need to wipe any custom rom that you have so you're starting fresh with this one not getting things confused so we've got the two things interacting nova launcher there is a paid version you can get that has extra features i'm not showing you that I'll show you where those paid features are and then of course the AOKP itself so we were talking about these custom navigation bar settings let's go ahead and take a look at that but while we're doing that we're going to pass some things along the way that I'd like you to take a look at so first let's pull down our tray here and you'll notice right away we've got a really cool powered control essentially we can turn Wi-Fi on or off gps on or off all kinds of cool stuff we can set the brightness of the screen right there very quick and easy really really cool i like it a lot we'll set that back to Otto and it slowly ramps that brightness backups are really kind of cool there but I can make all these changes one thing I don't like when I tap on settings it just hides that it doesn't take me to the settings and I don't know if you noticed or not but not all of the settings are listed there now there's a lot of cool toggles but not all the settings are so I'd like that to be the default settings app if you will the control panel it's not we have to live with it fair enough fast charge we've talked about bass charging a couple of other articles I think we did a video on it essentially fast charge is a way to push more milliamp into the phone so it charges faster now this is a samsung I don't know of any other devices that do it but Samsung devices in particular seem to like charging when pins two and three on the USB USB down there on the charger itself one pins two and three are bridged or shorted it'll tell the phone hey charge faster well if you've got a samsung charger it works great if you've got a generic charger or you're charging over USB which is how i charged it doesn't charge faster charges just not super fast so using that setting right there it essentially tells the OS at the kernel level to just ignore the fact that those pins are jumped and you can enable fast charging of course if you don't want to you can toggle that off it comes off by default so that's some cool stuff let's go into more settings this is settings for the ROM itself looks like your typical settings dialog box we're going to go ahead and come down here Oh actually back up to the top a little bit you'll notice under quick links we have rum control so let's open up rom control and in here it's got some information about the aokp people that you can donate to if you like it and want to contribute to the the work and let me just say this started out as well this was the first custom rom that I ran on my galaxy nexus because they didn't have Knightley's of of ice cream sandwich for cyanogenmod when i started getting in and hacking around with this phone so I went to the aokp I used it you know and I couldn't get past the the pink unicorns sorry about that but I couldn't since then they've made a lot of progress this is build 31 so make sure that you're getting that i'll put a link to that over in the article of pocketnow.com let's go ahead and take a quick look at some of the options that you can set here there's a lot of them so we're going to go really fast general you I this is where we can disable the boot animation yes it is a pink unicorn you can disable that right there disabled bug mailer I don't know what that is I think that's if you run into a bug it will email them like I kind of showed you a little bit earlier I think that's where you could turn that off if you wanted to allow 180 degree rotation lets you rotate your phone 180 degrees even upside down really awesome in fact I like that quite a bit sometimes you just need to have it in a different position like at my desk at work I have the headphones and the USB charging coming out of here and it's rotated you can see just like that so i can now see the screen and I've got better access to my ports so really kind of cool there a horizontal recent window this is not on by default basically it lets you have a webos style task switcher so we can look at that and see okay this is what it looks like here versus the up and down you might like it you might not personal preference you can turn that off if you want to LCD density I haven't played with that current density is 320 if you want to set that higher lower you can do that that makes stuff bigger and smaller from what I understand the off animation cr2 style you know where you turn off an old style TV and it pinches and you've got that bright white line just like that that's what that does that's how you can turn that on and off the input method editor switcher if you've got a keyboard open you might want to switch to a different keyboard this is particularly helpful when you want to switch between say swipe and the standard android keyboard you can do that enable volume options i haven't played with that i assume its options that have to do with volume yes that's stating the obvious for a little bit of humor there custom carrier label I've never seen this in action tell you the truth I don't know where you see it but I have set it to aokp they are quick to warn you that once you set that it's set the only way you can get rid of it is to wipe the phone and start over with a fresh install of the rum I don't know where it is I thought that it would be up here somewhere but you know what there it is aokp it also appears on the lock screen that's where that came from too so learning stuff even while shooting the video how about that hold back to kill okay that sounds devious but it's not what that means is if you're in an app you can press and hold the back button and it will end that task and take you to the previous screen really kind of convenient I find myself accidentally toggling that so I have that set to off let's go ahead and take a look at the next section and that is the navigation bar that's probably why you're watching this video because holy crap this is awesome so let's go into the nav bar we can set the menu location to right left both move whatever kind of cool there I think what that lets you do is you know when I rotate my phone I like having my menu down here versus over here and vice versa some people might like it on the other side and there are times when I felt that it was on the wrong side when it rotated so I think that might do that I'm not entirely sure it's probably the three dots though haven't played with it find out let us know in the comments there's your homework menu a visibility how and when do you want the menu buttons to appear right there very simple you can have it all a show and that didn't always show so who knows we'll set it back to default navigation bar color you can set the color to whatever you want we're not going to mess around with that too much right now the navigation barros jumped ahead quantity I've set it to five at defaults to three that's these buttons down here I've got it to five so we can do other cool stuff and I'll show you that so let's say I don't want this to be a phone anymore I want here's a tip for you took me a little while to figure this out if I tap over here on the icon it will let me change the icon based on a picture that I have in my gallery if I have an icon folder that's great I don't so it's not going to show you anything that's worthwhile but it does let you do crops and whatnot if you have an image that you want to use and you can crop out the section that you want don't one in the meantime it uses the default icon for the app if you tap over on the left side you can pick what the action is rather than what the icon is we're going to choose a custom app let's say we want to get something else let's do all applications and instead of phone we want to do people so just like that now its people and when I tap on that it launches my people app so very very cool I can even set something too long press so let's say I want to long press this and have it be a dialer so I can go ahead and come in here to phone now when I long press it launches my dialer very very cool so I can do the same thing for all of those other buttons down there including setting up search which is just right there in one of the default actions really cool i like it a lot you can set a blank if you want to have some spacing space it out a little bit better for you you can set the glow animation when you tap on it you've got that glow well it turns out by faster you set that the faster your phone is so or at least when you're interacting with that area i should say so i've got this set to super quick you can even set it to off quick and normal normal of course is the slowest and it gets faster and faster from there all the way up you can set the transparency of those buttons you can see that all the way they're gone to all the way super bright I like mine somewhere in the middle and they're just kind of fair it really kind of cool what happens in the long press on home well I've got mine wired up to go to my recent list really cool there I can set the width and the height I haven't done that I've just set it to 42 DP whatever dps are as the default no jokes about that guys ok and if you get stuff all screwed up you can reset the nav bar right there so we're falling behind under timeline let's look at the next in lockscreen really fast we can choose the wallpaper wallpaper Picard just like you're used to you can change the style which stock quad octo AOSP honeycomb it's set at honeycomb right now you can play around with all these it's just preference what does it look like menu unlock so if you've got a menu icon that can unlock the screen for you a lot more helpful if you've got physical buttons rather than these guys we'll go ahead and turn that off because I don't have that that change does require a reboot the wait to lock screen this is very very handy i like this quite a bit when i turn the phone off or when it goes to sleep i can set a specific amount of time to wait before when turning the screen back on the lock screen appears I don't like it when it's immediate because often times i turn it off and i forgot something i have to turn right back on then i have to unlock its pain in the neck so i can set a time out here and say don't show me the lock screen for 30 seconds 45 seconds whatever it is just know that I'm turn it right back on still me fair enough really really cool feature i love it i like it quite a bit standard android has that when the screen times out but they don't have it when you turn it off by hitting the power button this lets you do both and you can do that with cyanogenmod as well los screen battery percentage shows you the battery percentage on the lock screen great it's awesome it shows you up here in the status bar too but it's nice to have that on the the locks lock screen whether if you've enabled the ROM controls Weather Service you can use that it does have to go out get your location it is network-based location that GPS so it takes less power than turning your GPS chip on and off and then of course it has to get the the weather information for that put it on your home screen or your lock screen so it does take a little bit of overhead for me it's worth it volume wake you can use the volume keys to turn the phone on I particularly don't like that and why because I can have volume music controls when I'm listening to music now whether that's Pandora whether that's google music or some other player when I have my screen off it'll time off after a time or timeout after a time and then I can change to next track just by hitting up or down with the volume controls really kind of nice of course that means it's not being a volume control at the time so if you do a lot of volume changing you might not want to enable that mines disabled right now just because but again you can't have volume wake and volume music controls operating at the same time if you're listening to music you can if you're not listening to music and then they play just fine lock screen calendar this is what I told you about I don't have a calendar set up on this rom yet so it didn't show me any appointments but you can have it so you just turn your phone on and it shows you to your next appointment without having to get into your phone without unlocking it it's right there really fast really like it you know that'd be super cool for say a Windows Phone challenge maybe I don't know anyway let's get back here time range this is about the calendar how many days do you want to look forward a day three days however long use colors color coded events and whatnot hide ongoing events multiple events blah blah blah bass torch I would love to show you this but it wasn't working right for me it were great off camera and when I try to do it on camera it just broke essentially what this is supposed to do is when your screen is off and i think it's also when it's locked i think that was my problem you press and hold the power button and just press and hold it and the torch the LED will turn on and it will stay on until you let go of the power button and then it will turn off really cool now your phone is a functional useful flashlight it's not like those apps that you have to turn on your phone unlock your phone find the app hit the button use the slider click the thing okay great turn it off no you just pull it out of your pocket and press and hold you've got a flashlight let go and the flashlights off it's perfect it's the way it's supposed to be why didn't we do this before I don't know probably because it doesn't work right but I'm sure they're working on that horizontal lock screen yes I can have a lock screen and horizontal orientation it's not going to show you because I have that timeout but you can actually have lock screen right there which is nice when you have this set down in an impromptu dock or set down in an actual dock that uses the phone's pogo pins really cool I like it I like being able to rotate it and it's fast enough now an ice cream sandwich that I don't mind the extra time that it takes to rotate quick pin unlock show lock screen before unlock I don't like that one I think you know yeah you can play around with it and then you can set up some custom targets to to launch apps right there lock screen lots of cool stuff you can do power menu you can add stuff to the power minus like screenshot power saver torch airplane mode navigation bar lots of cool stuff turn them on and off as you like them and that's just you come over here it lets you set that very very cool very fast a really nice way to to get lots of stuff right there in fact if you hit reboot it will ask you how you want to reboot you want to reboot the phone do you want to reboot into recovery really awesome I like it a lot here's the weather part that we were talking about where you can enable or disable the service use a custom location just so you know what I'm in Syracuse this is my zip code just don't worry about me i'm always here or if that's unchecked it will use your rough or your course network location to find where you are it'll show the location as well so you know where you are and i do that because sometimes getting your network location can be done via your Wi-Fi and depending on your Wi-Fi sometimes it thinks that i'm in scottsdale arizona which needless to say is significantly warmer than syracuse utah if you want to have it so that helps me double check that i know i mean syracuse or scottsdale or wherever again using your course network not your gps location that's why it does that there's advantages disadvantage metric units i'm in the US we don't use metric so i have that on toggled you can enable that and they'll show your temperature in celsius and they'll show your wind speed in kilometers per hour and Fahrenheit and miles per hour respectively refresh interval I've got that set to an hour I figure you know this is Utah the weather changes every hour anyway so set that to 60 minutes we're good to go nice thing about Utah if you don't like the weather wait an hour statusbar weather style we can have a weather panel we can have it above the carrier text we can have it disabled I've got a weather panel I really don't know where that is where's the status bar I don't know but that's something you can play around with and of course let us know when you find out in the comments power saver this is kind of cool i like it and i don't like it at the same time this lets you control how you can save power based on the condition of your phone so for example when the screen is off what do I want to do with my data well I want to switch to 2g because 2g takes less power than 3G unless you're using it all the time and then it takes more I know that doesn't make a lot of sense but if i turn off 3g and switch over to do g generally speaking when the screens off I don't care if the this data is going to come in and it's going to save me some battery life I can even turn data off entirely or you know don't do anything at all I can set a delay on how long that takes so I've got it set to a minute here after one minute then switch over to 2g seems to be working great and set it anywhere from immediate to 30 minutes up to you sink action do you want it to stop syncing do you want to do something else when your screen is off you can set that here what do you want to do with Wi-Fi I'm going to leave it alone you can turn it off you know whatever you know what let's turn it off because we still have 2g something to keep in mind is that does mean that if you're listening to pandora it's going to switch you over to your data network and start gobbling away at your precious cellular data instead of your hopefully unlimited Wi-Fi data so I turn that back on sync data usage we can leave that untouched whatever sync mobile data preference we can prefer 3g whatever lots of stuff that you can set set it to how you want what works best for you LED options that's your notification LED you can change it to how long do you want it to pulse on I've got it set to one second we can leave it for 5 seconds anywhere in between how long do we want it to be off between pulses I've got it set to 5 seconds so it'll be on one second off five seconds on one second off five seconds you can customize that however you want you can even change the color and there's a huge broad you can change to any color that you want in here it it's ridiculous you find what you want set it you're good to go so I've got mine at a nice blue and then I've got it set to flash that led while the screen is on so even when i'm using something i want to know if i've got an alert it's just a consistent you I thing you know I'm a web developer so I like consistency in you I if I've gotten alert yeah I know I've got you know notifications up here but I also always have that regardless just something I do and I like it if you don't you can uncheck it whoo lots of stuff down few things left and we're going to buzz through these because they're not quite as in-depth as those status bar we've got general stuff we can auto hide the toggles after you toggle something in a lot of hide the bar so again up here if you switch something it'll auto hide I don't like that so I've got it turned off you can enable the brightness control I haven't really gotten this to be able to work I don't think unless it's that one let's see that's supposed to let you slide across the the status bar which I thought was up here to control the brightness and you know it just doesn't do that is that down here I don't know I've got it right there any way I like it there so I'm turning that off if you don't like your USB debugging icon come on we're developers we hook these things up to our phones and we run adb and whatnot across them all the time so you might not want to have that debugging icon on all the time you can turn that off right there you're still in USB debugging it just doesn't tell you that and that might be nice if you're a developer or if you're using this rom and don't know what it is because you're not a developer go ahead and turn that off transparency this is kind of cool you can set the transparency of I believe this area right here I have left it at no transparency because it says turning this on might affect performance and battery life so I don't want to do that can also change the notification tour lay out just how do you want it to be laid out regular reverse traditional I like it the way it is so there we go moving on to the next thing toggles we can make these toggles first of all we can enable or disable them which ones we want which ones don't we want lots and lots of stuff in there I don't know what swagger is if you do let us know in the comments down below and you do have tether down here so that's kinda cool let's turn that guy on and then look at that there's my Wi-Fi access point I can turn that on or off I can change the order that they appear in pretty easy there can change the toggle style from the icon only to icon and text I can also change it to be buttons with a little line underneath instead of toggle switches I like the toggle switches they take up more space but you know it's a better be you I in my in my opinion and then of course if you screw something up really you can reset that really fast right there with a reset all toggles clock that's pretty much basic anything you want to see they're no good moving on battery the cool thing i want to show you about this you can change the battery bar location you can also change the icon style i like the circle mod that tells me up here here's the circle it's got that percentage right inside it's easier to see for me that way to know what the percentages and go from there i can also turn on the charging animation but it warns me that it may result in a poor user experience and i should enable at my own discretion i haven't done it because I my discretion says I shouldn't so I'm agreeing with that you can set colors and the bar thickness and whatnot there as well signal if you want to change your signal over here and your signal meters to show you know percentages or to show how many decibels instead of how many bars you can do that you can use text right there so I've got eighty-two percent on my Wi-Fi all kinds of cool stuff performance here's where you don't have to have set cpu which is a separate app for root users you can set your scaling I've left this at default which is 350 at the minimum 1200 at the maximum using an interactive governor I haven't changed anything so I don't need to set this at boot but if I wanted to I could change those and then check that box it's going to revert those changes the next time i boot up voltage control I can do that too I'm not going to go into what voltage controls are in this this video because it's just an entirely different topic it has to do with power savings and heat savings and a bunch of other stuff look up voltage control AOKP and you can find out if you want to give us a quick summary go ahead and do that down in the comments below and just share your knowledge with us as well you can also come in here and do some some memory based performance optimizations so free memory you can say how much is the minimum amount of free memory that it should keep alive you can set that to pretty much whatever you want in here as soon as your free memory drops below that threshold task killer will start killing stuff off you can set that at boot scrolling cash the the more scrolling cash you have the better scrolling looks but the more memory it takes more memory it takes unless you have to run out of stuff and the slower things are so you can I've got it just set to default you can change that around and get in my experience just marginal performance increases but you might have a different experience so that's how you can do it this is a kernel tweak in another place where you can set up fast charge I showed you the other place before you can turn that off turn that on there you go color multipliers and gamma tuning that has to do with the screen and how the colors look if you want this to be night mode you can do that and set it to kind of a red that theoretically will also save a lot of battery life because you're using one out of the three pixels of course those being are gb you're only using the red and the red is the most power-efficient of those three pixels so you can save some power there if you like doing that I only really like that at night when i'm out stargazing or whatnot last one is startup tweaks and you can set all kinds of stuff I've got it turn on it's turned off by default I've got it set to zipline apks so if you've got any any apps are installed that are not aligned zipline that'll do it on boot you can enable SD boost which is essentially caching to the SD card this phone doesn't have an SD card so doesn't do me any good there I can run fix permissions sometimes when we're doing all this stuff installing custom roms and whatnot the permissions get screwed up this will fix it the fix permissions process takes a while so I've got that turned off it only happens at boot but and not screen on but actually boot up if I have a problem I'll man manually run it I do have it set to clear cache any cash that was left over assist control don't know what that is if you do let us know in the comments down below and enable schedule test yes cron jobs I haven't got any I don't know what I'd use is a cron job but maybe I need to upload something every day at two o'clock I can theoretically do that by enabling cron right there okay so that's the ROM control control panel the settings essentially everything else is pretty much the same let me show you right in here about phone this is android 4.0 for this is the aokp mugguru and it doesn't show you in here but this is the it's billed 31 actually it does right down there don't 31 so you know what I'm looking at one last thing we have to go through and we're just going to touch on it because this is really a good topic for another video up coming in the future and that's innova the launcher that I've been showing you here is nova launcher take a look at the stuff in here i can do cool stuff with what are my new apps or am i downloaded apps i can come over here it has widgets that are included in there and use a drawer i can use a picker like the old style the gingerbread style come over here to a menu manage cops going to nova settings directly so i can go nova settings that are rather than having a shortcut on my home screen but it functions pretty much like what you'd expect but there are a whole bunch of other settings these settings are really fun you can see this little ribbon over here that says prime if you can't read it and it is essentially what you get if you upgrade to the paid version which you can do via an in-app purchase through the market or excuse me the Play Store desktop how many screens and wallpapers your grid the margins you want to persistent search bar on the top how many home screens do you want and their location what kind of scroll effect do you want cube card snack none you want a faster device choose none wallpaper scrolling you can set it to no scrolling on static meaning only static wallpapers on the images will scroll whereas live wallpapers won't scroll delayed which may help performance scrolling with live wallpapers I've never had a problem but if you want more performance you can play around with that infinite scroll if you want to just keep scrolling to the right going to the left I guess I got those backwards didn't I you can keep going and going and going it's just a loop so instead of getting to the edge and then having to scroll back the other way you can just keep going and it will loop around and around and around really kind of cool I like it I haven't turned it on for this wrong if you don't want labels underneath your icons turn them off right there your folder preview you can set it to stack a grid a fan however you want that to look the default is stack I have left it there kind of cool set it to whatever you want folder preview we just look at the folder background you want that to be a circle a square a platform platform sounds cool or something custom can do that too drawer this is basically your your app drawer do you want to show widgets in it yes or no you do need root so yes you can get this launcher and run it on a phone without root you just can't get some of the Rue dish features this is one of them scroll effect this is the transition when you scroll betraying it do you want card sat cubed none whatever well card stack works for me then if you want to hide apps you've got apps installed you just don't want to see you can hide them again that's a paid feature doc that's your doc down here above your navigation bar ok you can have doc pages so you can have multiple scroll left and right how many icons do you want in there four five six two whatever you can set that in there how much margin do you want do you want a divider between the doc and the rest of the icons on the page I don't and then if you do have multiple dot pages infinite scroll on or off and if you want a shadow at the top and the bottom of the screen I'm going to turn that off just because I haven't noticed it and if I haven't noticed it I don't think I need it hey gestures I haven't played with gestures because its prime it's a paid-for thing you can either enter a code or buy it through the playscore play store or cancel behavior just show you some stuff in there back up all your settings or restore them that you can do that right there so really kind of cool like I said this rom came with version 1.0 point one there was a market update to 1.0 point to that came in automatically for me I can check for a new update just like that if I want to says the current version is the same version that I have so okay good deal I can set my default home if I don't want Nova Launcher anymore I can come back in and just choose regular launcher and we go back to nova launcher because that's what i'm showing you and then of course we showed you the back up in there if you run into bugs problems this is how the developer knows you're just enabling error usage and reporting or error and usage reporting so that the developer can make it better for all of us you can turn that off if you don't want to participate do you want to reset it there you go and then of course another plug to upgrade to the paid version of nova launcher now I know I went through that really fast just to kind of show you what you could do with nova launcher it is the launcher that comes with aokp it is very nice I like quite a bit and as long as I believe you have to have an android-based excuse me an ice cream sandwich based rom to run nova launcher but it will run on even unrooted phones just without the ability to run some of that rooted features that you saw in there okay really really long video I apologize for that guys but there was so much stuff in here to show you if you can get past the pink unicorn in fact let's go ahead and change this to something else how about there we go much better Andy riding a unicorn with a rainbow coming out its butt yay I don't know why they picked unicorns but they did you can turn them off you can get rid of them do what you want it's an awesome awesome rom it's very stable except for some of the more advanced weird features that you don't see our normal phones like the power button to turn on the flashlight and whatnot just you know have fun with it and I would highly recommend this if you don't want to have a you know cyanogenmod rom or if there's not one out there available for you again apologize for the length lots to show you what was your favorite part let us know in the comments and if you like seeing all this cool stuff you can do especially a persistent search button right there on your navigation bar give the video a big thumbs up and ignore the wounds on my fingers from working in the yard leave us your comments let us know head over to pocketnow.com so you can see all kinds of cool articles and get some links on where you can get this rom and the nova launcher from the Play Store for pocket now showing off aokp custom rom i'm joe levi you