ADW.Launcher: Best Home Replacement. Open Source FTW

[whatislove]

This is the review for the ADW.Launcher by anderwebs v7.7(http://twitter.com/anderwebs). This Launcher is full of enhancements for speed and has tons of settings over the stock launcher. This is basically the code from the stock nexus launcher combined with goodies from the old advanced launcher developed in XDA (takes features like drop to uninstall, customizable number of screens, etc) and more that he developed himself. I will go through and explain (with images) some of the main features.

Up first we have the screen previews. This is simple, either long press on the scrolling dots or press the home button to bring up these previews of all your screens. This is ideal if you have multiple screens set up or you are looking for a specific app/widget that you do not remember where you placed it.

By hitting menu-> settings, you get into some of the more advanced features of the launcher.

Up first we have the screen settings. You can customize to have anywhere from 2 to 7 home screens, whether you want the notification bar to show or not (gives it a cleaner look if hidden), scrolling speed, and overshoot. Setting it to 0 scrolling speed is silly fast, my personal settings are 200 for scrolling and 50 for overshoot.

Under drawer settings, you have options for zoom speed (for opening the app drawer), to use it horizontally (iphone style),and number of rows and columns in the app launcher. This is really useful if you have a lot of apps installed and want all of them to show at once.

The last setting is for UI changes. It has options like the nexus-style preview dots (tells you what screen your on), dockbar(more on that later), action buttons (shortcuts to the left and right of the launcher icon, and to hide all app names from the desktop. You can even change the highlight color for selected apps.

Back on the main screen, we have this nifty little extra he added called the dockbar. You get to it by simply swiping up on the drawer button. This is simply just a little bar where you can install up to 6 extra little shortcuts that you can access from any home screen.

Last but not least, is the actual drawer. clicking on those 16 little dots creates this amazing zoom effect that brings all your apps into view, exactly like what is seen on the nexus. Scrolling is amazingly fast (NO LAG! EVEN ON A G1!) and you can customize the number of icons that show.

Well thats it for my little review=p I hope this helps some of you!