Gadgetory

hey everybody its Jill from pocketnow.com today I've just got a quick little video to show you launcherpro an alternate launcher for your nexus one or any Android to device let's go take a look alright this is a watcher pro beta it is in beta right now its version 0.3 point zero this version lets you do a couple cool things I'd like to spend a little bit of time on a little bit later on in the video now if you don't know what a launcher is it's basically your home screen it's what you use to launch your applications in this case it replaces the stock launcher and i'm using android 2.1 cyanogenmod flavor in fact launcher pro beta comes pre-loaded with the latest cyanogenmod rom you do need android 2.0 higher and it adds some benefits and features and just some overall polish to your launcher scrolling between home screens is a lot smoother a little bit more animated you've got thumbnail previews of all of your screens just like with HTC sense you can configure your home screens right now I'm running five but you can have as few as one or as many as seven you've got some more interesting flying effects in your app drawer and a shortcut doc that's the really cool part about this app so let's take a look at that first of all you get to it by hitting the home button and you can see this is just a regular looking screen I can scroll between screens really quick but down here at the bottom you'll notice I've got my app drawer icon there's that fly in effect fly back you'll notice that instead of just having the dots over on the left and right hand sides I've got little app icons and if I scroll over to the next screen you'll see that those remain stationary these are the most frequently used apps that I use so I've gone in and I have reconfigured what comes installed by default with my own apps and to do that it's really easy you tap and hold comes up with a shortcut selector and come in and pick an application from the applications list and there's all of your preinstalled applications you can choose a bookmark you can choose just about anything so it's really neat now the reason I like that is in previous versions they had your messaging app or your SMS app that was just stuck there I don't use that I use google voice so now i can have google voice right there and i've got access to all my voicemails and my text messages really close to the touch of a button you'll notice that this is very similar to what they're doing the Froyo but with froyo you've got only two icons and as far as I can tell they're not configurable you've got phone and you've got browser that's it well in this case I like contacts better than phone because I have access to my phone from my contacts app and what if I'm using a different browser in this case I'm using fake chrome which is just a chrome icon that launches the default browser but if I were using dolphin or some other browser I might want to have that shortcut in there instead so I can configure that it's really nice you can also pinch to zoom and it will show you thumbnails of all of your current home screens you can even configure which home screen is the home home screen or the default home screen in my case I always put that right in the middle so I have equal number of screens to the left and to the right but that's really neat you can just tap to quickly go to another screen and tap to navigate back really cool little app you can try it out and if you don't like it that's cool you can uninstall it and go back just be advised as with any launcher you're going to have the default number of and the default type of icons on your screen so if you want to switch back to the other one no problem you uninstall it you're good to go but you're going to have to reconfigure that new or the default launcher at that point with all of your icons you're going to have to put them back in put your widgets back on the screen which really isn't a problem it's just a little bit inconvenient last but not least I want to show you the prep here you can set the number of screens currently at set to 5 and the default screen if you change either one of these you'll need to reload the launcher app again inconvenient but not a big deal you can enable rotation so you can have it in landscape mode a lot of the launchers they're stuck in portrait you can't turn your screen which if you're in a car with a car dock that's inconvenient to have your maps in landscape and then your desktop in portrait it's just not not that handy so like I said this is launcher pro beta version 0.30 and giving you a hands-on look at it I'm Joe Levi for pocketnow.com if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you would like to stay up to date with similar types of videos go ahead and subscribe to our channel if you've got an idea for launcher pro or if you have another launcher that you'd like us to take a look at please let us know in the comments