Gadgetory

hey guys it's random in a minute from pocketnow.com if you like the look of stock ice-cream sandwich but you want to have some control over it there are a lot of third-party launchers out there that are based off of Ice Cream Sandwich that do an awesome job at giving you a ton of customized ability in this video this episode of launcher wars we're going to talk about Apex Launcher which might be my new favorite launcher let's get to it so you might remember in a previous video we talked about how the HTC One X has a new version of sense since 4.0 which is lighter than before but still a little bit too heavy especially on the home screen for example folders sputter when you open them they don't open a smoothly a stock Ice Cream Sandwich so one of the first things that I did is I routed the HTC One X and I put a third party ROM on it which came with Apex Launcher and we're going to talk about it now now Apex Launcher looks like Ice Cream Sandwich because it's based off of Ice Cream Sandwich but it gives you a lot more control over your experience than what you get with stuck now of course this is the HTC One X and the one X has folders through sense but these are Ice Cream Sandwich style folders so folders open very very quickly not only that but you can customize the look and the feel let me show you how so I'm gonna go into Apex Settings here which is just the sayings for the launcher I'm gonna go into folder settings this is super cool so you can go to grid preview and specify how the little icons should appear within each folder so you can have sort of the iOS book you can have a grid book you can have it look like stock Ice Cream Sandwich where you can go with a fan let's see how it looks with the iOS look and we're gonna go back to the home screen has to refresh and as you can see even smaller previews of the icons that are within the folder let's go back to the apex settings and we're gonna change some more folder settings before we jump into the other features you can change the folder background which is super cool so we can have the ring which is right out of Ice Cream Sandwich you can have it be a square or have no folder background so we're gonna actually go to the ring and kind of give it the Ice Cream Sandwich look and feel but what you'll notice is that you still get the little tiny iOS style icons that looks a little weird my favorite is just keep on the folder background of iOS because it kind of looks cool and folder preview of the grid and then boom you get a nice preview of what's inside the folder without seeing icons that are microscopic another great thing about Apex Launcher is that it lets you resize every widget so when you tap and hold on any widget you get a resize menu and this is cool because this is the default stock Ice Cream Sandwich Google search bar but now you can resize it so if you don't need it to take up such a large space you can move it around and of course ice cream sandwich stock it doesn't let you move the Google search bar but now you can have it wherever you want and of course you can resize it now lets happen hold function does some cool stuff on other apps so for example if we go into let's go over here and go to ROM manager if we tap and hold we can edit it so let's do that and we can change the name of the item we can even change the icon which is really cool we can also look at app info we can share the app or we can remove it completely so a lot of extra functionality added there now let's talk about the app launcher in cents 4.0 it's this side-scrolling passionated clunky thing here in Apex Launcher I get back the Ice Cream Sandwich look and feel I can scroll to the right to these different columns and now I have a vertically scrolling list super fast super fluid look how quickly it opens boom and opens instantly and now I've got a much better way to add widgets to my home screen in Sense 4.0 there's this clunky thing that just has so many visual effects it's overwhelming but now I get back a little preview of all my widgets and I can tap and hold anything I want and bring it to the homescreen and drop it there and customize it to my heart's content also in Apex Launcher you can customize the number of screens you have you get the leaf-like feature so let's go back into apex settings and really quick talk about the drawer now since we just show the drawer look at the settings you get here that's so you can choose which apps are hidden which is terrific if there are some apps that you just don't want to see all the time in the widget trick you can sort the change the apps sorting there we can change the style of the drawer I've got it vertical and continuous so you get that nice smooth scrolling list you have a drawer animation I don't like animations ever so of course I turned it off there so it's as fast as possible and there's just so many options that you can choose from for your app drawer let's go back and look at the other things you can do dock settings so you can change the number of dock icons in Ice Cream Sandwich you get five in Apex Launcher you can go up to seven which is cool if you like to have a lot of icons on the bottom of course they'll get smooshed together which is fine because if you want to add more icons they need to get a little bit closer together in order to achieve that effect and the list goes on and on what you can do with Apex Launcher you can backup your settings so that if you install to a new device you can have it look just like it did previously and there are some options here in behavior settings talking about what certain swipes do you can have a swipe up show your notifications that's super cool so now for on the home screen we do a swipe up boom there's the notification tray instead of having to sort of reach your thumb all the way to the top here you can just boom swipe up and there's your notification tray so Apex Launcher the best part about it is that it is free and it's available in the Play Store so just go to search for Apex now there are other launchers that give the look and feel of Ice Cream Sandwich such as Nova Launcher we're gonna talk about those in future launcher wars but we want to talk about Apex Launcher because it's just a great option for people that want that look and feel of Ice Cream Sandwich though the way the folders open up instantly with the beautiful animation that doesn't take up too much time it's a really great idea to have if you liked this video please give us a thumbs up and if you want to suggest the a launcher for a future episode of launcher wars please leave us a comment that's it for now