ADW.Launcher Preview

Lead Hacker — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:20:55 +0000

One of the great sets of enhancements using a CyanogenMod rom instead of a stock rom is the launcher. Cyanogen includes an altered launcher called ADW.Launcher that includes lots of extra settings and interface tweeks. One of my favorite is the “preview” option, which gives you an expose (as in OS X Expose) style view of everything across the different homescreens on your device. By default you can bring it up by long pressing on the dots on the left or right bottom of the screen that show you which area you’re currently on. However, in the ADW.Launcher settings you can change the keybinding for the home key if ADW is already the active app. By default it just snaps you back to the main screen, but you can swap it to preview instead. Great usability change for me, lets me scan through my apps and widgets very quickly.

Launcher Dock

Lead Hacker — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:02:28 +0000

Another widget I’m running now that I have Cupcake installed is “Launcher Dock”. It’s a 1×1 widget that holds launchers for up to 8 apps. I put some of my less frequently launched (but still relatively frequently used) apps in there so that I can have all their icons on the main screen. This is a shot of my main screen with a configured Launcher Dock by the bottom right corner, just above the San Mateo weather widget:

When you tap the widget once it brings up a selector with launchers for each of the apps you’ve added plus an icon to start the widget configuration interface. Here’s what mine looks like after tapping on the widget:

And what the configuration interface looks like if you tap on that center icon:

I think it’s a pretty slick widget. Great way to increase launcher density if you have a few widgets taking up some space. And it looks pretty good there on the home screen.

Droid Hacks » widget

ADW.Launcher Preview

Launcher Dock