I’ve released a minor update with the following additions/fixes:

• Option to use the dock as overlay: this means your desktop will be full size and the dock will appear over it when you show it.
• When you trigger the “hide/show dockbar” action/gesture, the new status will be remembered until you show/hide it again. This is like the old option “No dock”!!
• Option to apply  the old’school color tint to the dock icons
• Fixed the desktop preview triggers
• Some fixes reported by users

Remember, hopefully tomorrow, ADWLauncher EX will be discounted in the Android Market! Keep an eye here!

Old post:

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working hard last months to make a nice update to all those ADWEX users out there celebrating its first birthday.
Its now almost a year ago that I released ADWLauncher EX to the market as a premium version of the free  ADW.Launcher. The market success was overwhelming to me and it brought lots of changes to my life (the most important one being my full time job as main android developer).

Today, I’m happy to announce that along the first anniversary of ADWLauncher EX, Google is making a great celebration too: 10 billion downloads in the Android Market!!.
This provided me the opportunity to lower the price of my app for the next days so more and more people can join us in our first anniversary!

So, yes, ADWLauncher EX will be at 0.10€ in the market in the next few days!

Just check the Android Market home page daily to see when the promotion goes live!

And that’s not everything! I’ve managed to roll out a big update for everyone with the following features/improvements:

• A new unified Dock bar with both the combined superpowers of the previous ones:

• Easily drag and drop icons into it.
• Unlimited icons support with paginated scrolling
• Options stretch, scale, show reflections, change the background image…
• Easy icon management by double tapping them.
•  Action to show/hide the dock at a glance via gestures/launcher actions

•  Easier and more user friendly folders.

• Drag a desktop icon over another one to auto create a new folder
• Visual representation of folder contents with theming support
• Options to choose how the folder contents scroll and behave like you do with the app drawers
• Single/multi row auto fitting support

• New desktop management system while moving items.

• Easier visualization of desktop and drag operations
• Easier trash can operation

• New desktop indicator inspired by IceCream Sandwich

• Improved compatibility with ICS devices

• Use of hardware acceleration on specific features when possible.

• Persistence of the ActionBar visibility on android >3.x tablets by the “hide/show status bar” gesture or launcher action.

• Usual bug fixes and performance improvements

• More to come!!!

I wish everyone enjoy the update, the opportunity of getting it at reduced price and… thanks for being there in our first anniversary!!

P.S.- Important: during the Android Market promotion days, I’m not allowed to push updates to the market, so if you find anything weird, a bug, a feature not working as intended… please use the feedback menu under ADWSettings!!

One or two weeks ago, some devices started to get Android 3.2 update…. and suddenly ADWEX ADWSettings menu stopped working….

As the summer is here and my job granted us some free time in the hot afternoons, I took the opportunity to make sohme other changes in addition to the 3.2 fix. Read next:

Changelog:

• Fix the incompatibility found within ADWSettings against android 3.2 (I still don’t know how, but it fixed while messing the xmls :P)
• In Android 3.x tablets, the top Actionbar now displays a customizable shirtcut to the left instead the ugly app icon. It’s set to “open app drawer” by default, but you can modify it by longpressing it and pressing “Edit” in the popup, like any other icon :)
• In Android 3.x tablets, the top Actionbar displays also a few menu items to the right (in the order set up by you with ADWSettings/General Behavior/System Preferences/Customize menu), because a lot of people wanted to get rid of the “Lock desktop” fixed item there.
• New dockbar (The secondary dockbar, the one you reveal by “swiping up” over the Main Dock) design thanks to @joshuas_79 :
• New option for the dockbar (yes, the secondary one, remember: you can put any number of icons in there, it has scrolling magic) can now be set as “primary“.
• Both docks are now always horizontally placed at the bottom on big screen devices (10″ tablets)
• If you have a folder within the main dock or the dockbar, you can (finally!) drag and drop items inside those folders.
• New “Quick Folder Popup” implementation:
  • User folders now display in a horizontally scrollable/paginated icon list (usability/speed improvement IMHO)
  • Custom app groups “Launcher Actions” can be set to be show in the same “popup” or in the full app drawer via a new option in the “Edit Shirtcut” screen (see screenshots).
  • This popup can be themed (more info below)
• A bunch of other small tweaks and fixes, as usual, but nothing “big”, sorry :(

Theming info:

I’m sharing a few “hints” about how to properly put together some elements of an ADW theme, but hopefully soon, Master @klinster will be able to bring more in depth help to themers out there:

1. The new “Quick Folder Popup” can be themed providing three drawables: qa_popup, qa_arrow_up and qa_arrow_down. The original pictures are attached in this post for you to use as reference.
2. Make sure you place your drawables in the proper directories, or your theme will look ugly.
   1. For example, icons:
      

      Icon sizes must respect the android guidelines, this is:
      -ldpi=36×36
      -mdpi=48×48
      -hdpi=72×72

      Why is this so important? Because if themes do NOT contain icons with the proper resolution/density, they will look distorted/pixelated/etc. And think about this: if you DON’T put HDPI icons within your theme, your tablet customers are going to be mad at you!
      Also, putting a 96×96 icon within drawable-mdpi/drawable-hdpi will only cause the icons to be poorly scaled down to comply the standards…. just an advice.

   2. And different screen sizes/orientations:
      

      Take for example the dockbar (the secondary one). It needs just one drawable to theme it: dockbar_bg.

      • If the app is running in a phone, in protrait mode, this dockbar appears as an horizontal row of icons at the bottom of the screen.
      • If the app is running in a phone, in landscape, this dockbar appears as a vertical column of icons at the right side of the screem.
      • If the app is running on a tablet device, this dockbar appears as an horizontal row of icons at the bottom of the screen (in both portrait and landscape mode!)

      So, for a proper Dockbar theming you should design at least 3 images!

      • res/drawable-port/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-land/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-xlarge/dockbar_bg.png

      But also, if you want to provide the better looking pictures for teh user, you should provide density dependant drawables in the proper directories!! So this could be something like…

      • res/drawable-port-ldpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-land-ldpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-port-mdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-land-mdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-port-hdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-land-hdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-xlarge-port-mdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-xlarge-land-mdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-xlarge-port-hdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • res/drawable-xlarge-port-hdpi/dockbar_bg.png
      • …….

      So…. yes, this can be as complex as you may think of, but it ends in showing the properly sized/better quality images. And remember, NinePatch drawables are best to fit this kind of items in a bigger range of screen resolutions!!!

Conclusion:

I know there are a lot of things to do to provide a better user experience and improve the overall quality of the app, so I apologize in advance for any issue you may find (or have found). I’ll try my best to improve things… I always try.

Best regards!

=(AnderWeb)=

• Improved “a bit” desktop scrolling
• Added a way to save your own configuration presets in the presets list (kind of experimental, let me know).
• Added a new option for the “Screen orientation” supporting turning to landscape for devices with hardware keyboard.
• Fixed compatibility with android 3.1 (my fault for being stupid)
• Added a bunch of translations (some of them partial) thanks to all the contributos from this crowdin translation group http://crowdin.net/project/adw-launcher-ex
• Various fixes from your reports (thanks everyone for submitting them)

Do you want to help getting ADW in your language? Please join the translation group!!

That’s all for today, enjoy!

Sorry for the last update, there were 2 major bugs in there:

• Scrolling between desktops suddenly stopped in between screens when the desktop scrolling speed was set up very high.
• If you added a folder to the dock or dockbar, you got a nice FC loop :(

So i’ve “kind of” fixed them and released v1.3.2… hopefully this one lasts a bit longer. On a side note, I think I’ve fixed a bug regarding some devices (like the dell streak one) where the “portrait orientation” was not being properly applied…. but as I don’t own such device the “fix” is unconfirmed.

My apologizes again!

Previous post (v1.3.1):

Rebember, with great power comes great responsibility, and with ADW updates, come .1′s :).

I’ve made a few fixes on ADWLauncher EX v1.3.1 for some minor annoyances and reported bugs, nothing big.

There’s a new option (ADWSettings/UI Settings/Icons) called “Density Hack“. This is enabled by default on large and xlarge MDPI devices to load HDPI icons instead of the MDPI ones. This is what google did on Honeycomb’s launcher… and although I don’t like the way they did it, is quite “cool” or whatever and otherwise some honeycomb  users would get very tiny icons on their “awesome” tablets…
Anyways, some other users may like smaller “real state” icons so I’ve added it as an option (options? inside ADW? what?) ;)

I’ve also been noticed about some of the transition effects causing strange graphic glitches in some devices (mostly the cube inverse, but may be other ones too). I’m working on it, but isn’t fixed yet on this release.

Enjoy!

Old post:

Hi everyone.

First of all I want to apologize for the lack of updates…I’d like to give you all a clear explanation about it:

As some of you may know, I started the ADW project long ago as a learning/having fun thing. I was unemployed and wanted to learn things to do with my phone. I spent between 5/8 hours a day on it during the first year, releasing weekly updates (sometimes even daily). You all made the project grow up with constant requests, suggestions, ideas, etc, and the most important thing: you made me get a new full time job dedicated to android on a cool spanish company called Iphonedroid.

The bad news? After a full year unemployed, getting back to work changed everything, and it’s taken longer than expected setting up a “daily development schedule” for my personal projects. Well, I’m trying to find a good way of going on devvin’ (:P) ADW in my very limited free time and without getting my family mad at it. This is how i’ve managed to push today’s update.

I can’t promise weekly updates, but I really want to do more regular stuff. One of my top priorities is putting something back into “ADW2″ project (which its been succesfully worked on by Florian Sundermann with very cool additions) porting some of the EX goodies into it and the opensource world.

Also, I DO read EVERY email I get, sometimes the answer is fast, sometimes I need to find some time to sit down and reply… But feel free to go on sending suggestions, requests, bug reports, etc!

Ok, enough boring stuff for today, now the good news:

ADWLauncher EX v1.3.0

Changelog:

• Completely redone the app drawers code from scratch to improve memory usage and scrolling performance, even with transparencies, live wallpapers, etc
• Scroll snapping on the vertical drawer/4d drawer “a la launcher 2″. (option enabled by default)
• “True” home screen looping (enabled by default) ported from ADW2.
• New theme management screen with added functionality (and more will come)
  • Dock and dockbar background customization moved into the new theme management screen.
  • Users now can select a different theme for icons/dock/dockbar/all the rest.
• Removed the persistence option due to being removed from android 2.3 (and it was really hacky btw).
• New transitions from popular demand: cube, cube inverse and wheel.
• New “desktop zoom” option when opening the app drawers (enabled by default)
• Drawer swiping in the opposite direction of the scroll to change app groups (disabled by default, and I’ll add more visual feedback on next update).
• Experimental Honeycomb compatibility with enabled hardware acceleration.
• Better large and xlarge screens compatibility (wether on android 1.6, 2.x or 3.0)
• New quickactions implementation for desktop long pressing items with new actions. (ported from ADW2)
• New implementation for the counter bubbles with improved appearance.
• New error reporting system to send (if you want to) direct crash feedback and spam to me :)
• Lots of minor fixes here and there from user reports.
• Other things I might have forgotten :P

I know is not a “big biggie”, but… hey… we’re back!

For themers out there:

If you’ve made themes for ADW.Launcher and/or ADWLauncher EX, you should add this lines to your res/values/theme_config.xml :)

<!-- remove this line if you don't want it to show -->
<string name="authorName">Your real name/nickname</string>
<!-- remove this line if you don't want the market link -->
<string name="developerName">Your android market developer name</string>
<!-- remove this line if you don't have one -->
<string name="authorLink">http://your.web.site</string>

Also, you can now include in your themes a proper activity and “call to ADW” to apply the theme. I’ve included an intent for this:

Intent i=new Intent("org.adw.launcher.SET_THEME");

i.putExtra("org.adw.launcher.theme.NAME","x.x.x");

startActivity(Intent.createChooser(i,"Apply theme to..."));

This will be compatible with ADW, ADWEX and any other fork after I push the changes to git, but currently will only work on this version of ADWEX.

Next release:

Next week I’ll be pushing another release with all the community translations for ADWEX, so if your language is not there, feel free to join and submit! :-)

Also my TO-DO list for ADW is BIG, so expect always some new option, bug, etc ;-)

Another “small update”. Here’s the changes list:

• Reorderable main menu can disable elements and reorder by drag and drop(ADWSettings/General behavior/System settings).
• Added transparency support for the 4D drawer (yes, it’s choppier, i told you, I’m not that good programmer).
• Added an option to show black fading edges, when using transparent background on the 4D app drawer.
• Support for custom images for dock and hidden dockbar.
• Added a small catalog of dock pictures based on my own themes.
• Option to change app drawer icons text color.
• Menu/Lock now locks app drawer too.
• Fixed old style previews when statusbar was hidden.
• Fixed fancy backgrounds transparency issues.
• Fixes more “ForceCloses” and added stability and code improvements.

Hope you enjoy!

Cause of an small bug withthe menu lock/unlock not showing the proper text, I’ve released a small update to fix the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Original post:

Another small update, sorry guys my new full time job eats my whole days…

Here’s an small changelog:

• Added a reorderable main menu (ADWSettings/General behavior/System settings). This is cause a lotof people hate the Phone Settings menu inside ADWSettings menu (and I think they’re right). Thanks to CommonsGuy for their fast utility, if someday I get the knowledge I’ll be contributing back to him by adding a “toggleable menu” feature to the project.
• Re-added option to hide labels on the app drawer. (this one went removed from the standard ADWLauncer by accident)
• Added option to select transition effect when opening other apps (ADWSettings/General behavior/System settings).
• Fix the random mode not being used when scrolling with the desktop dots.
• Fixed dock reappearing when full screen app drawer.
• Fixed drawer icons text alignment.
• Fixes some more “ForceCloses” and minor stability and code improvements as usual.

Hope you enjoy!

I’ve released an small update for ADWLauncher EX with the following changes:

• Added option to open the app drawer in full screen (hiding the dock/dockbar)
• Added options to tweak the “fancy icon backgrounds” (now you can select a custom color and enable/disable glossy effect)
• Fix the dock icons reverting sometimes on rotation
• Fixed import/export ADW settings for Samsung devices running android 2.2.1 update
• Lots of fixes for “ForceCloses” and other stability and code improvements.

And to celebrate the new year and the ADWLauncherEX success, I’ve published the ADWNotifier app free for everyone on the market!

Hope you enjoy!

ADWLauncher EX is now available through AndroidPIT market for everyone who prefer buying through paypal, have problems with their credit cards not allowing Euro payments or just don’t have Google’s support on their countries!

Hi everyone and Merry Christmas!!!!

I’m proud to announce a new toy for all of you, desktop tweaking addicts. Here’s what I’ve named “ADWLauncher EX“.

Differences between ADW.Launcher and ADWLauncher EX

ADWLauncher EX is based on the ADW.Launcher opensource code with a lot of new additions and improvements, like for example:

• 5 different app drawer styles/behaviors
  • 3D Nexus One like applications drawer
  • 2 different plain vertical applications drawers styles, the “old one” and a new fast and smooth one
  • 2 different Iphone-like horizontal applications drawers, a traditional paginated one and a new one with continuous fling
• Different desktop transitions (8 at the moment): new animations while navigating through your desktop screens. Try them all, they’re crazy!!!
• New Icons configurations/look and feel: Tweak your desktop icons, change its sizes, add coloured backgrounds, change font size, color, etc!
• New fast presets mode: Quickly change the whole desktop configuration by 1 click!
• Editable desktop icons for applications, shortcuts and folders!
• Lots of code improvements
• More, more more to come!!

Q&A’s

¿Is this opensource too, like ADW.Launcher?

No

Er….. what??? Are you serious?

Yep

Hm….. So we won’t be seeing ADWLauncher EX source code being released anytime soon, right?

I haven’t said that :-)

When?

When I think it’s time to do it. I’m really tired of some parts of the “android developer community” using my code to develop cool apps (it’s an honour but) never contributing to my (or other) opensource projects, or even put a single mention out there about their code “origins”….

So the amount of ADWLauncher EX code being opensourced and the time rquired to do it will depend on a lot of factors from now on.

Are you discontinuing the free ADW.Launcher?

At all. And I’m always trying to have both projects “in sync” so all new ADW.Launcher features will be added to ADWLauncher EX, and *some* ADWLauncher EX features will become part of ADW.Launcher too.

And remember, ADW.Launcher is an opensource project, anyone could fork it and go on developing it (as a lot other developers have done but without releasing sources)….

Also remember that I’m not the only guy developing ADW.Launcher. @boombuler is coding and helping a lot.

Screenies

• Option to Lock/Unlock desktop to avoid dragging/moving/removing items (Press menu/more/lock-unlock)
• Some small fixes

Enjoy

Old post

Hi everyone.

Another “small update” out there.

Changelog:

• New option to choose the thrash can position (Top/Bottom/Top Shrink/Bottom Shrink/None)
  • If the users choose “none” they can remove desktop items by the quickactions
  • The shrink options also shrink the desktop space when showing the trash can
• Quick actions for desktop items. Thanks to http://code.google.com/p/devoquickaction/
• Added Launcher Actions to main ADD menu
• New option to choose if the app drawer remains open when longpressing icons while the dockbar is open.
• Items can now be draged out from the action buttons or edited by the quickactions
• Fixes and added bugs as usual

Hope you enjoy (or hate) it :-)

Minor bugfix release:

• Fixed the korean translation
• Re-added the old icon tinting option for the dock
• New option to select the color for the dock icon tinting

Update v1.3.2

Another small bugfix release:

• Fixed (at last, hopefully) the desktop indicator disappearing forever
• Fixed a FC when selecting certain icons from IconPacks
• Updated translations
• A few other small FC fixes

Old post

Hi everyone,
Small bugfix release here (no, i’m not gonna change the app drawer icon, sorry).

Changes:

• Updated translations.
• Fixed the overscrolling if you have “desktop overshoot” set to zero.
• Fixed the desktop indicator disappearing
• Fix the horizontal app drawer getting stuck if open while loading the apps
• Other small fixes for FCs

Hints:

As not everyone like the new app drawer icon, you can create your own app drawer icon by doing this:

Menu/Add/Custom Shortcut/pick activity/Launcher Actions/Open-Close App drawer
Then you can leave the default icon or choose your own one and put it on the dock in whatever position you want.

If you want the old icon design, download this to your phone and select it as icon when creating your custom shortcut.