I won't list every feature LauncherPro offers over Sense, because there are many. I will just list the ones that I actually use for practical reasons:
1. Instead of only using 2 of 3 buttons in the Sense dock (the App drawer arrow and the Dialer... who uses the plus button? just long press the screen), with LauncherPro I can get 5 buttons that I use all the time (Dialer, Messages, App Drawer, Gmail, Browser)
2. For uninstalling apps, I don't have to go through menus to get to my applications list, or pull up the market, or use an uninstaller app. I simply drag an icon to the trash can at the bottom and hold it there for a second, and it asks if I want to uninstall. Quickest and easiest way to uninstall an app.
3. I can disable the nameplates for icons on the home screens. So many great apps, so many horrible names. EStrong's File Explorer? Horrible name. Not to mention the nameplate is only big enough to show half the name. And I'm sure after having an app for a day, we become accustomed to visually recognizing it by its icon. We don't read the nameplate and go, "Ah, here is my Gmail." We simply see the Gmail icon. So I turn nameplates off.
4. With nameplates off, things look a little too spaced out. Luckily I can opt to have five rows of icons instead of four. Things fit much nicer that way.
5. (This one is a long one, but so awesome) I can disable the wallpaper from scrolling. Now, a scrolling background is one of the cool features of the Android OS, so typically I wouldn't want to disable it. But say someone sends me a portrait oriented pic taken from their iPhone that I want to use as a background. Well, this will be easier to explain with an example...
Original image below (768x1024)
Now when we want to select this as our background, we are forced to crop at 960x800, a 6:5 ratio (because the wallpaper must scroll) which is slightly landscape oriented, and larger than the original image in terms of width. Trying to use this as a background would look something like below:
The result is below. We lose a large portion of the top and bottom of the image, as well as a loss in quality due to enlarging an already low quality image.
In LauncherPro we can disable wallpaper scrolling. So we simply need to bring the original image into an image editor and add some blank space to the left and right, to make the image meet the 6:5 ratio. The resulting image is 1229x1024 pixels, as below:
And so our final wallpaper on the phone looks like this. It actually shrinks a bit instead of enlarging, to fit 1229x1024 as 960x800, so the perceived quality
increases (only slightly heh). We also only lose a small amount on the left and right sides, nothing on the top and bottom, and the black areas that were added previously will never be seen because the wallpaper doesn't scroll. SUCCESS!
As I said, those are just the five reasons I actually feel like I
need LauncherPro. There are other perks such as 3D app drawers, customizing the dock icons and appearance, and scroll speed adjustments that are just icing on the cake. But those don't affect my day to day use like the five reasons I listed do.
