Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and one of the things I really like showing you about Android is how you can customize it and one of the main ways to do that is with alternate launchers or home screens well today I've got a home screen that reminds me of something I saw way back in my Newton days called a life string it's called slide screen let's go take a look okay to start with what is a life stream well a live stream is a concept wherein the information that is most relevant to you is displayed first and foremost in your graphical user environment now the way that I saw this was very very sketchy it was just a concept really didn't even function it was more just a demo than anything but what was trying to convey in the way that it worked was really revolutionary and I haven't seen it ever since so what am I talking about well imagine if you will you have a cascading card deck and on those cards one of us is the is in the front you've got a whole bunch behind them and some others that aren't quite in the front yet and if you put that on a timeline the one that's in the front is what you're working on right now or what is most relevant to you right now as you go back through the deck you get stuff that you've worked on in the past and as you scroll forward through the deck you get stuff that you haven't started working on yet that's scheduled to be worked on so okay that's all very abstract let's do real-world stuff so let's say I'm at work and I'm writing a Word document well in that front card is or that front window to borrow a term from Microsoft and Apple is my work doc and I can fill that up to the full screen just like you can today but when I restore it back down or minimize it back down it goes into the front card and if I want to see the excel sheet that I was working on just a few minutes ago I can scroll back to the previous card oh and before that there was an email and before that there was a PowerPoint presentation and before that there was a website and I can scroll back and forth and back and forth as I get new emails they come up into the deck now why is that important why is that revolutionary well right now we've actually gone through a few iterations of how we get to data how we work with stuff not just on phones but on computers so for example if I want to work on a Word document back in the early Windows days I had to find Word open it find my document and then open it well that's made progress with file associations and whatnot where now instead of first opening word and then opening the document now I can actually look for the document open it and it knows that it's a Word document so it uses word or maybe it's a PDF or maybe it's an Excel spreadsheet it will open the app than it needs to to be able to interact with that information so instead of being programmed centric now it's information centric and that's really the concept behind these live streams now instead of being content centric now it's timeline centric and the stuff that is most relevant to you is closest to the middle of that deck and the stuff that's not is further away from the deck all right you with me so far now like I said I have not seen that concept applied in practice since way back when I had my Newton message pattern actually it was in the early days of that it was a 130 not even my my twenty one or twenty two hundred but back to this this app is the closest thing that I have seen to actually realizing that concept where you have kind of a deck of information now what do I mean by that well if we look in here right in the middle we have our day date and time we have our wireless status in this case you can see I'm connected to Wi-Fi I have a relatively poor signal strength and I even have my time of day over on the other side of that I've got my current weather conditions and yes it looks like I'm shooting this in the middle of the night because the Sun hasn't come up yet but it also shows me my temp and the the weather conditions so all of my pertinent information right there right in the middle and then as I fan out from that I have personal information at the top and I have more peripherally important information at the bottom so I'm not really a true cascade like I was telling you about before with the live stream but still very interesting and very unique and very useful so let's go up to the top here first of all well before we do that you'll notice we don't have any widgets or rather we don't have the ability to plug in any third-party widgets rather all we have is what comes with the app which is kind of limiting but it's still kind of nice because it's relatively thoroughly thought out and has a lot of the stuff that you'd want to add onto the screen with widget city and weather forecasts big clocks Facebook stocks Twitter you know all kinds of stuff ok so let's go back up to the top up at the top we have phone calls missed phone calls voice messages and whatnot right there and it'll show up with a little indicator like on my calendar we've got email next one down and I just read on my email before shooting this video calendar items says I've got three upcoming events and it shows me them and over on the other side you'll notice that they're all color-coded so I can see at a glance what kind of information that is if I want to go into this information simply tap on it and then I'm presented with the default Android of view so that's all very nice and very very familiar so moving down to the bottom we have information and this is information not necessarily about me or direct interactions with me but about stuff that I'm interested in in this case I've got some articles I've got some Facebook I've got some stock quotes let's see stock quotes and again they're color-coded CF industries right now is down 301 take a look at that and it says hey this is a whole bunch of CF symbols so which one do you mean well I mean see if industries Holdings Inc and if you take a look this is where I bought into it I sold when I got about there and it's since then tanked and been climbing a little bit some wild activity but this is just you know your normal Google Finance app it does really nice it does what it's supposed to do so not bad there but that information is right there pulls it out of my portfolio and it presents it to me on the screen complete with you know not just the price and you know whether it's up or down it also has an iconic already stocked quote it has that color coding on the other side and then of course it's got more information in this case it's got a volume indicator to show you what the trading volume has been and I really really really like that it's subtle it's simple but it shows you more information but this isn't about stocks let's go on and take a look over here we have a Facebook post we'll tap on that this is still an interface that's inside the app rather than taking into the Facebook interface which is nice it keeps you there it keeps that information local so then if you want to act on that you can go further but if you're just looking informational II you can look at it right there so very nicely done but I can't see everything for example maybe some of that stuff isn't important so I can grab that middle bar and move it up and now I just have my calendar stuff or rather I have what I currently have alerts on up at the top and if I need more room I can scoot that down just like that and vice versa if I want just my information now I can come down in here and it provides an information screen that's just infinitely scrolling so very very cool and you know like I showed you before you can then dive right into those and do all kinds of fun stuff now is there much more that you can do well not really let's take a look we have three buttons down at the bottom that we can get into by hitting the Menu key we've got help we've got phone settings and home settings phone settings is what you'd expect it's the standard Android phone settings home settings on the other hand is just preferences orientations whether you or not you want the status bar because you don't really need it because you've got it all in that center bar and then of course how you can set up your whether your Facebook stocks calendar Google Reader Gmail Twitter all that stuff so kind of neat there now you might be thinking that's great Joe but how do I launch any apps from this thing well that's a very good question and I will show you that coming right up all right so I've been using this as my launcher for the last couple weeks and this morning I actually switched it back to launcher Pro and I forgot to set it back to slide screen so I went ahead and did that and now you'll notice when I hit menu the behaviors a little bit different instead of pulling up that menu which you can still get to by hitting menu again but instead of doing that what it does is it pulls up your launcher and it's divided into two parts you see that up on the top it's kind of gray it brings up your notification bar status bar at the very top which is optional on the home screen and then it's got your apps down in the bottom now the way this is divided is really nice up in the top I've got my most frequently or my most commonly used apps the ones that I want to have ready access to and I have manually placed them up there and in the bottom is my whole drawer worth of apps all bazillion of them but on the top I can scroll to the side either way and just wrap around it shows me a little indicator here that says you know this is what panel you're on if I want to add a new icon up here to to my quick launcher what I need to do let's say I want to do bump so tap and hold on that and you'll notice everything else is grayed out and up on the top now these little guys are wiggling around so I'm gonna go ahead and put this right here next to shop savvy and there you go I've dropped it on there it's right there it's easy to access the launcher here the app launcher the app tray is just very very well thought-out it's simple its elegant and I'm still back with my information which really is the most important part of the phone in my opinion it's right there it's right on screen it's at a glance this is the natural evolution of Microsoft's today screen from the Windows Mobile days so really impressed with it I'd still like to see a real life stream launcher app that I could get into and use that that functions like a true a true stream of data rather than something like this but I'm sure that's that's something one of you guys hopefully if you're watching an in development developer can can bill for me in any event this is the pro version of the app it is not free I'm not going to tell you prices on this it's not all that much because prices have been fluctuating quite a bit there is a free version of the app that has a an ad down here at the bottom is the last item which really takes up quite a bit of real estate when you're talking about information on the screen but it's so radical I highly recommend that you go out and grab that and try it and see if you like it it's gonna take you at least a couple days of using it exclusively before you're gonna get a taste for it and it's not something that's going to be easy to get used to because it is such a divergence from from your traditional launcher screens so go ahead and give it a try I want to know and just a side note up here I'll mention I just got a new email and up at the top I've got an email with a little email indicator right there came through while we were talking and of course I've got my phone sounds muted so you didn't hear anything just a nice subtle little reminder hey you've got email and the indicator is also color coded to the type of information yellow for email green for calendar so very cool anyway back to what I was saying I'd like you to go out to the market I'd like you to try it search for slide screen all in word download the demo install it try it tell me what you think especially what you think of the setup process it's rather impressive it takes care of setting everything up for you in one very easy process that you can get back to again if you decide to skip it by going in to help configure the weather and basically go through this whole wizard but let me know in the comments what you think of the app what improvements you'd like to see in a future version and if you would use something like this or this in particular as your larger app on a semi-permanent basis go ahead and leave those in the comments if you like seeing different ways to customize your Android please give this video a thumbs up and you have if you haven't done so already subscribe to our video channel it doesn't cost you anything and it'll help you keep up to date on everything that has to do with mobile and handheld tech and let you impress your friends which we all know is really what life is all about so for pocket now and showing off slide screen pro I'm Joe