Gadgetory

android-powered smartphones and tablets both have the ability to run soft buttons on your home screen some manufacturers opt for physical buttons instead but you can still put soft buttons there this app lets you configure customize change and even hide those soft buttons with one caveat I'm Joe Levi for Pocket now let's go take a look what we're talking about here is your navbar or your soft buttons some devices have physical buttons on-screen some have soft buttons in this case these are soft buttons this is a nexus 4 it is routed you are going to need super user to be able to get this to work the name of the app is ultimate dynamic navbar stay tuned to the end will tell you how to get it on your device the first thing you're going to do after installing the app is turn it on you can see I've already done that all of these are the default settings start at boot so you'll always have this when your device starts up display notification that's that little arrow up there in your notification bar and get rid of that if you want to toggle mode that will never hide itself automatically blah blah blah let's get right to it ok if you notice I've got this little teeny grey arrow down here in the bottom if I tap on that I get a nav bar or soft buttons and it automatically hides away that's great but you can see it double stacks I'll tell you why it does that at the end of the video for the meantime let's just take a look at this really cool it's got some translucency to it it's got all of your common buttons and then you can even customize them so let's look at that let's go ahead and go back that's enable buttons from here you can see what we've got button one is back and long press is that menu now that's not this button that's that button so let's go ahead and long press that there's no menu settings here so it's not doing anything for me button 2 is home with a long click action of none let's go ahead and change that let's change that one I don't know what we want to do let's change that to home to just because we can button 4 is our recent apps excuse me that was three number four then let's make that a search button and now you can see quickly we have search now that's neat I always like having search right there but it's not really what I want to show you so in addition to being able to customize what buttons show up and what long presses do for those buttons this is really what's kind of neat you've also got you know The Hideaway which will really be cool liberating some of that screen real estate once the developer can remove it this stock navigation bar down at the bottom safely we'll just leave it at that the other thing that you can do is change the theme and behavior let's take a look at themes first right now we're running the default Nexus theme so if you look at it the icons look identical to what I'm running at the bottom that's cool I like it but you know let's change it how about Motorola there's the Motorola theme change it again HTC that looks like your HTC buttons change it again Facebook Facebook buttons and last but not least Xperia and that's what the experiment ins look like just to make it look a little bit different let's let's set it to Motorola for the time being just so you can see we can also change the height of the panel if 48 pixels is too big you can change it make smaller just like that save even more space when it's in its open State you don't have to hide it that's another thing so you can have that unhidden and just drop that down from the space that it occupies now to whatever size you want or if you've got it set to auto hide you can make the buttons even bigger just like that really kind of neat you can do what you want with it again as soon as the developer can get rid of this safely and version 0.94 he did version 0.95 he turned that off because it was somewhat dangerous you can also get into transparency so let's go ahead and make the transparency a bit higher so now you can see through it a little bit more kind of reducing the impact that it has the visual impact on your your experience you can see the background behind it that doesn't do a lot here but I'll show you on the home screen let's make it last a little bit longer the showing State let's make that last a little longer too so let's come on over here to my background how do you like that and you can see big buttons with transparency I probably want to go back in and make that a little bit darker a little bit less transparent but that's my preference and yours could be different the name of the app is ultimate dynamic navbar and it is available at xda-developers we'll have a link to the exact thread and where you can download the app over in the article at pocketnow.com this version was version point zero nine five it is a beta it is a work in progress it works pretty well with one caveat the ability to hide your stock soft buttons has been temporarily disabled because there was some kind of a problem with people breaking devices which isn't a good thing so for now you have to that might be okay if you want to hide your navbar some other way which you can do or if you just want to go in and customize or add other frequently used buttons that you don't want taking up screen real estate if you've got questions comments or want to participate in the discussion make sure you head over to pocketnow.com if you liked what you saw share this stuff with your friends on any of your social media networks for PocketNow I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching