Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocketnow.com one of the things we really like about Android is the ability to replace the default launcher you know your home screens the thing you have your widgets and your icons and and launch all your apps from it's really cool that you can swap that out with another one that does really all kinds of cool things so that having been said let's go check out Nova Launcher for Ice Cream Sandwich ok so this is my Galaxy Nexus the GSM variety I have OEM unlocked it and rooted the phone but if you want to use the Nova Launcher you don't have to do that there are actually two install methods one you install just like any normal apk and one that you can install as a system app so you can get a few more system level bells and whistles so let's go ahead and look at what you can do here with just the regular app so the first thing you're going to notice is I have four icons across and five icons up the way I can do that is I no longer have that ubiquitous Google search bar across the top and using this launcher I'm freed up to use that extra row four icons which is really kind of nice let's say however I do want a Google search bar on one of my screens so we'll go ahead and open up a new screen now normally to add a widget we would go into our app drawer and come over here to widgets and we would see a grid kind of a paged view of the widgets and what they look like on or what they will look like on your launcher instead now we have the old fashioned Google widget chooser here which is just a list and hopefully your widgets have been named very well by whoever developed them so you can add them quickly but I don't necessarily like that in this view but you'll see why I like it in just a minute so let's go ahead and to Google search and there we go it's right there up at the top if we want to move it we can tap and drag to any one of the five positions so just as easy as that now if you want to you can turn on the ability to resize widgets so we're just going to tap and hold choose resize and look at that we took a four by or one by four widget and we turned it into a one by two so really easy we can do all kinds of cool stuff just like that let's go ahead and resize that back out just so we can see it now if I want to add another widget instead of going through the app door now I can long press and I've got my add to homescreen dialog just like I had on previous versions of Android or I can add an app a shortcut of widget or get into wallpapers right here from the home screen so to show you that let's go into widgets and let's say I want the beautiful text clock to buy one widget there we go just like that so a little bit of the older way of doing things on the newer technology I really like that in this context going over into the the app drawer context not so much but let's talk a little bit more about the app drawer first thing you're gonna notice up here is we've got this little triangle here in the corner so if I tap on apps I can now sort by or filter by it all new or downloaded which helps me be able to refine what I'm looking at without having to page through a whole bunch of these panels just like that I can't scroll over to widgets anymore but we saw why next you'll notice I don't have a market icon up at the top instead I have a menu icon so let's go ahead and open that and you can see I still have quick access to the market but I can also manage my apps very quickly from here without having to open up the settings control panel for lack of a better word there and I can also get into my Nova settings now again this is the noble launcher so let's open that and see what we can do wallpapers scrolling we can turn off for better performance we can turn on if you want it to look nice and you know wallpaper scroll II you can set it to be static only so if you have a just a regular picture that you're using is your wallpaper which a lot of people are you can set that so that that will scroll but live wallpapers won't and that's the setting that I have and then delayed wallpaper scrolling is delayed which may improve health the route may improve performance with something that we don't know if it's the developer didn't put that all in there kind of funny to scroll effect now I don't know if you noticed or not when I was changing home screens I had kind of a cube animation I like that kind of stuff it does take a little bit of time so if you want speed you'll want to turn it off you can do that here you can set the scroll effect to none or cube to options right now we're probably going to get more in the future I'll show you cube here in just a minute when you get back there screen orientation you can set this to default which is normally locked but it can rotate if you're docked we can auto rotate if that's set in your system settings we can neither force it into portrait or force it into landscape so kind of cool what you can do you can now have a you know landscape view if you like operating your fill in that way on your home screen without flipping your phone around quite as much we'll leave that at the default their label icons we can display or not display a label underneath the app shortcuts which is kind of nice if you know Gmail looks like the gmail icon you don't necessarily have to have the word underneath it we'll leave that at the default but you could turn that off if you wanted to just to kind of clean up some clutter desktop grid we can set the grid size for the apps and widgets on the desktop right now it's set to five rows four columns we can adjust that this is really the best way to do it without overcrowding and getting overlapping stuff in my opinion but you can make that more dense if you know you favor density over over brevity next let's get into widgets you can put widgets in your drawer that was what we were showing you before notice there weren't widgets in the drawer there was just the widget list you can put them back in there but you have to install it as a system app which this is not now installing as a system app does require that you have root so we're not going to show you that right now but know that all those complaints that I had you can do it you just have to jump through a few more hoops to be able to get it being able to resize all widgets is not set up by default you have to manually tick that checkbox but as soon as you've done that you can resize your widgets very simple very easy very self-explanatory it's great you can get updates check for updates just like that now this is not available in the market yet it's only available through xda-developers we'll give you a link to that over in the article pocketnow.com so make sure you head over and read that article so you can see how to get that but there is an update mechanism built right into the app so you don't have to keep going back to XDA to see if there are are new things that you can install you just have to check that and it'll go from there of course we have error and usage reporting that you can send back to it tell the developer how you're using the app and if you're running into any problems so he can make some some changes and probably the best feature of all from a guy who goes through a lot of launchers from the settings you can actually change what launcher you want to use so I haven't set any launcher as default right now I have launcher which is the one that comes with the Galaxy Nexus and I have nova launcher nova launcher is this one so i can go ahead and select that but this feature lets me have quick access to be able to go in and change that and you'll notice that it says it's not set as my default home because i didn't put a check in that checkbox but really kind of cool alright so let's go back I'm gonna hit home because I haven't set a default it's gonna ask me which launcher I want to complete the action with will stick with nova launcher now this is what i was saying about the animation or the screen transition will go ahead and change you see how that has a nice 3d cube effect right there it's really still kind of quick so not bad at all and gives you a nice kind of look and feel that we're used to with stuff like the the launcher pro and atw lunch or e^x apps so really really neat stuff there are a few other bells and whistles that you can do with this app but for the most part that's what most people are going to want to get it for it's really cool it's really fast and well essentially it's a worthwhile replacement for your stock app for your Ice Cream Sandwich device that's a kicker you do have to have Ice Cream Sandwich because it is extending the the pre-existing Ice Cream Sandwich launcher with its own special code and capabilities so keep that in mind you don't need root unless you want to be able to widgets in your app drawer over there which I don't think is a big deal but very neat cool we're interested to see what your opinions are do you like this kind of stuff if you do let us know why is it missing features let us know in the comments down below showing off all kinds of cool new stuff you can do with your Android powered phones in this case the Nova Launcher for Ice Cream Sandwich for pocket now I'm Joe Levi