LauncherPro [Pros and Cons]

LauncherPro: A Better Home Replacement App 

One of the key characteristics that has contributed to Android's popularity among technology enthusiasts is the platform's flexibility. It's possible for third-party developers to build replacements for many different components of the Android user experience, including the home screen. Among the third-party home screen implementations available from the Android Market, the most functional and popular is arguably LauncherPro.

Created by independent developer Federico Carnales, the LauncherPro home screen offers a multitude of useful configuration options and practical features that are not available in Android's standard home screen. Launcher Pro can be installed at no cost from the Android Market, but the developer also recently began offering a "Plus" version for $2.99 that offers some premium functionality, including a sophisticated collection of custom home screen widgets that are inspired by HTC's Sense environment.

The look and feel of LauncherPro closely resembles that of the standard home screen. It has support for multiple pages of icons and widgets, a dock at the bottom that persists across all pages, and an application drawer that displays icons for all of the programs installed on the device. Unlike the conventional home screen, however, LauncherPro is exceptionally configurable. You can configure the number of home screen pages, you can completely change the appearance and contents of the dock, and you can set the behavior of the physical home button. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Dock

The LauncherPro dock can display up to five icons at a time at the bottom of the screen. To configure the behavior of one of the icon slots, you just long-press the position in the dock and select the "Change Shortcut" option from the context menu. You can assign it to launch any application, activity, or standard home screen shortcut. You can also choose to make it open the application drawer or switch to the next or previous home screen. The icon is configurable, too. The user can select a custom image or choose one from among LauncherPro's own set of white silhouette icons.

Each dock slot can also optionally be assigned a secondary launch behavior that will execute when the user performs a swiping gesture over the icon. For example, I have configured one slot in my dock to open the regular Android dialer when tapped and launch the voice dialer when it is swiped. This feature effectively allows the user to have two behaviors associated with each item in the dock.
Assuming that you devote the middle dock slot to the application drawer button, you can still have eight separate launchers alongside it by utilizing the tap and swipe behaviors on the other four slots. That's a lot better than the two non-configurable launcher operations that you get with the dock in the standard Android 2.2 home screen.
That's already a pretty big win for dock functionality, but it gets better. You can create multiple separate dock configurations and switch between them by swiping horizontally, much like the gesture you would use to flip between the regular pages of the home screen. This is useful if you have different functions that you want to have more readily accessible at certain times.
For example, I have a secondary panel configuration which includes launchers for the map and camera applications—software that I use frequently when I travel but typically don't need when I'm at home. When I travel, I can just swipe over to the panel configuration with those items, making them more easily accessible.

Preview mode

One of my favorite features of HTC's Sense environment is the zoomed-out home screen preview mode, which makes it easier to navigate between pages of the home screen. LauncherPro includes a perfect clone of this feature, which behaves just like the one in Sense. You can initiate it by doing a pinch-zoom gesture on the home screen. It displays thumbnail previews of your home screen pages and lets you switch to one by tapping.

It works really well, but I think that there are still some ways that it could potentially be augmented. I really wish that I could reorder the home screen pages by doing a long-touch drag-and-drop on the thumbnails.

Options

I've often expressed frustration with the fact that the standard home screen doesn't automatically rotate when the device is flipped into landscape orientation. That limitation is particularly irritating on the HTC EVO 4G, which I generally want to operate in landscape mode when I prop it up on the built-in kickstand. LauncherPro fortunately remedies this problem by supplying an auto-rotation option. When this option is enabled, the home screen will flip into landscape mode when the device is physically rotated. I was particularly impressed to find that it will work regardless of whether the device is flipped clockwise or counterclockwise.

LauncherPro allows the user to configure the behavior that will occur when the user taps the physical home button while already viewing the home screen. You can have it toggle the application drawer or notification panel, for example, but it can also be used to initiate the home screen page preview mode.

Another welcome option for some power-users is support for adding an additional row to the home screen. This is especially useful on devices with a big screen like the Droid X where there is a lot of wasted space between the individual rows. The downside of adding an extra row is that it gets a bit glitchy in landscape orientation if you have the auto-rotate feature enabled.
There is a nice option that will allow you to hide the labels of icons on the home screen, but it sadly doesn't work for folders. There are also options for toggling the visibility of the notification bar, configuring the number of rows and columns in the application drawer, toggling the application drawer's 3D cube effect, and adjusting the home screen page scrolling speed.

Widget resizing

The features that I have discussed so far are all available in the free version that you can download from the Android market. That's already a lot of useful functionality. The premium version has a few compelling extras that will appeal to power users, including a custom widget set.
The killer feature of LauncherPro Plus is support for resizing widgets. When you long-tap a widget and then let go, it will be surrounded by an orange border with a resize handle. You can use this to adjust the widget's size on the home screen. It's important to note that this will work with practically any conventional Android widget, not just the special ones that are bundled with LauncherPro.

Some conventional widgets are obviously not designed with resizing in mind and will consequently not display properly at certain sizes, but it generally works as expected. One of the first things I did was shrink Android's standard search widget, which obnoxiously wastes a lot of space (Android's search widget has a built-in text box, but you don't actually type in it—the whole thing is basically just a launcher for the platform's search application).
LauncherPro Plus makes it blissfully easy to shrink the search widget, freeing up space for extra application launchers. The music and power control widgets can also be reduced in size by one row without having to sacrifice any functionality.

Premium widgets

Aside from the resizing, the premium widgets are the other major feature of LauncherPro Plus. These widgets, which are loosely inspired by HTC Sense, are very well executed. The set includes a contact thumbnail grid, a bookmark thumbnail grid, a calendar and schedule widget, and a pair of messaging widgets for reading SMS messages.
The calendar widget is outstanding, easily beating other similar stand-alone offerings that can be found in the Android market, such as the Pure Calendar widget. It has two modes, a month view and an agenda view. The agenda view shows you a scrollable list of all of your upcoming appointments. Each one has a colored strip next to it to indicate the calendar from which it originates. You can tap the item in the agenda list to view or edit the event.

The month view shows a grid of all of the days in the month and will display a little triangle in the corner of each day that has scheduled appointments. When you click a specific day in the month view, the widget will switch to the agenda view and jump to that day. There is a button at the top right-hand corner of the widget that you can use to toggle between month and agenda view. A plus button next to the view button will let you add a new appointment without having to open up the calendar application.

There isn't much to say about the contact and bookmark widgets. The bookmark widget shows thumbnails that you can click to launch the browser and start loading the desired page. You can configure it to display the bookmarks in alphabetical order or in order of usage frequency. The contact widget will show the faces of your contacts which, when clicked, and will pop up a little bubble with supported actions for that contact—much like regular contact shortcuts.

I'm not much of an SMS user, but I was still modestly impressed with the Messaging widget. It shows a scrollable list of recent text messages, each accompanied by the date and time that it was sent and a picture of the contact. You can tap a message to view your complete conversation thread with the associated contact.

These widgets are just the start. The developer is working on adding more, including a social networking widget that will support Twitter and Facebook. He's rather prolific and is adding features at an impressive pace. Even though the custom widgets are relatively new, the ones that he has created so far are at a much higher level of quality than the typical crap from the Android Market.
The Android market only allows developers from a small handful of countries to sell software, so many have to turn to alternate distribution methods. The creator of LauncherPro is unfortunately in that situation. As such, you can't buy Plus directly from the Android Market. To get LauncherPro Plus, you have to install the free version from the Android Market and then use PayPal to buy a Plus activation code from the developer. When you pay the $2.99 via PayPal, you will automatically receive an e-mail with the activation code. You just have to type it in and you will get get access to the resizing feature and all of the premium widgets.
After using LauncherPro for two months, I was very happy to hand over $2.99 for the Plus version when he made it available. I think that the outstanding calendar widget and the resizing feature by themselves are more than worth the cost. The rest of the premium widgets are just extra-sweet icing on the cake.