Introducing the Minimalist Beauty that is ssLauncher
A delightfully complex yet simple creation from developer ChYK. Have you ever wished that your portal to all the apps and games you used every day was a little more stream-lined? How about uniform? Not barages of little icons, but easily accessed labels on neatly genred home screens, maybe you can come up with [...]
A delightfully complex yet simple creation from developer ChYK. Have you ever wished that your portal to all the apps and games you used every day was a little more stream-lined? How about uniform? Not barages of little icons, but easily accessed labels on neatly genred home screens, maybe you can come up with something more imaginitive? ssLauncher will give you just that control over the arguably most used part of your phone or tablet.
UPDATED: May13, 2012
CURRENT VERSION: 1.5.12
REQUIRES ANDROID: 2.2 and up
SIZE: 971k
PRICE: Free
* Features
- Decorate screen with a variety of styles for shortcuts and widgets.
- Create a widget poping up when tap a shortcut.
- Support formatted text for current date & time, missed calls and unread SMS/MMS messages.
- Support scrollable widgets.
- Easy and quick access to pages for contacts, bookmarks, application drawer, application group.
- Many useful features of application drawer: app parcel(folder), showing/hiding app, marking star for favorites apps, changing application icon and name, uninstalling app and so on
- Create application group and manage list by drag and drop.
- Save and load your theme, page layouts and settings.
- Convert the saved theme file to apk. (contact us by e-mail for more informations)
- Hide status bar, open status bar by swiping down.
- You can implement nice screen without launcher 7, dvr, minimalistic text, wp clock, clockr etc.
Originally installed with the idea of making your favorite apps, games, widgets, and content in general into a quickly navigated electronic magazine, you’ll first start this launcher to a tabloid-enfuzed gateway to your phone, camera, browser, messaging, and email. Some of the links need configuring but with a tap, swipe, and tap you’ve got yourself a budding idea of what all this launcher is capable of. Move over a screen to the right and you’re greeted with an empty view labeled Hot!, expected to get you started in to the launcher’s feature of application groups. Another screen and you’re brought to the launcher’s application “drawer,” simply a page containing all your (you guessed it) apps. The next two screens are more like two full-paged widgets, your contacts and bookmarks respectively. And interestingly, the last page is credits ammending the all the different people responsible for this gem of a launcher.
The true treasure of this app does not lie blatantly on the surface however, and is not readily forced upon the end-user until they decide to really dig in and customize some cover pages. Whereas it lacks overall settings ssLauncher quickly makes up for the fact by way of its built-in options for its shortcuts. You can resize any shortcut and widget to any size to really achieve the desired look, there’s support for a number of fonts and styles including plain images. If you’re familiar with the idea of “hubs” in Android then you’ll see exactly why this launcher is as good as its rating will lead you to believe. That’s because this spp will take up the space, and not nearly the resources, of all the widgets and/or Photoshop work that hubs generally mandate. Aside from that, if used as intended for a magazine style then you’re still working with in incredibly unique and boisterous take on a launcher that you should be proud to display to any wandering eyes.
I myself have not been able to delve too deeply into the launcher, but can say that it runs fantastically on my HTC Vision and rather buggedly on my ASUS Transformer Prime. Landscape also feels kind of awkward, but a great feature of the app is that it can be set to keep separate profiles for portrait and landscape orientations. You should really consider ssLauncher the Original, the paid version which introduces some extra features.
Camron Kitching
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