How Do I Customize My Android

I have been using my HTC Desire for half a year. Recently I’ve rooted my phone (which I described in my previous post) and flashed the custom Cyanogen 6.1 ROM. It’s equipped with the ADW Launcher, which is highly customizable. I’ve spent a few days customizing it to my convenience, now looks pretty good (for me), at last. I’d also like to share a few hidden tricks with Cyanogen which users can easily missed out, as well as some un-popular good apps which I like.

Icons

The ADW allows me to change the icon of the shortcuts on my home page. I do that a lot so that I can recognize the shortcuts easier, as well as having a better look of the screen. :P To do so, long press on your icon and then release it on the same location. You can select your own image stored in your SD card, or select from downloaded AWD themes. I put this paragraph at the beginning, just in case you got confused with the custom icons shown below. :)

Main Dock

The “Main Dock” refers to the bottom fixed bar. I expanded it 5 slots because I really want to utilize all space available. And then I changed the home paginator to bottom sliding bar instead of regular Android-style dots, and have it auto-hide. This way I can still know where I am while scrolling thru the home pages. These settings can be found under Settings à AWD Launcher à UI Settings.

The first slot is a small simple app called “Lock Screen”. It does nothing else but to put the device into sleep. I use this because I don’t want to press the hard power button: it’s just not located in a convenient place for my finger.

Having said that, I also changed a setting in Settings à CyanogenMod Settings à Input Settings, so that my trackball button wakes up the device. I really find it more convenient than the power button located at the top.

The second slot is the App Drawer. In case you don’t already know, yes you can recreate the App Drawer shortcut by going Menu à Add à Custom Shortcut à Pick Your Activity à Launcher Actions à Open/Close App Drawer.

Third slot is the “ES File Explorer”. I find this to be the best file management app available in the market. I also rely on it to exchange files with my computer, by using the LAN functionality.

Forth slot is a file shortcut pointing to a blank text file stored in my SD card. When clicked, it opens up with m favorite text editor called “TxtPad Lite”. This shortcut allows me to quickly launch a note, type, and then save.

There are many apps that can create file shortcuts, including the ES File Explorer. However, sometimes they don’t work for many reasons. I ended up creating the file shortcut manually using an app called “Any Cut”. You’ll need to have a little technical knowledge on Android’s Intent API to do this thou. For my case, I used these parameters:
• Action: android.intent.action.View
• Data: file:///sdcard/mynotes.txt
• Type: text/plain
Yes the typing is a bit inconvenience. I’d love to allocate some time to develop a simply app to help me do this in the future.

In case you haven’t noticed, the commonly-important shortcuts such as the phone app and contacts app are not in my main dock. Yes, to me the device is much more than a phone, these functions are not what I mainly use it for.

The last slot on the main dock is a shortcut to show the “Dockbar”.

Dockbar

The dockbar is sometimes quite confusing for users new to Cyanogen. Look at it this way: it’s the second page of the main dock. You can “flip” to the dockbar by sliding your finger from the bottom edge of the screen up. By default the dockbar is empty, so you’ll thought your main dock is gone. But what happen actually is you can drag icons and drop it in. To “flip” back to the main dock, it’s even trickier: slide your finger from the bottom edge of the screen up – and then – slide back down.

So after some touching around, I found a way to create a shortcut to show/hide the dockbar: Menu à Add à Custom Shortcut à Pick Your Activity à Launcher Actions à Open/Close Dockbar. With this, the dockbar now becomes very practical. You can also find more settings for the dockbar in Settings à AWD Launcher à UI Settings.

The good thing about the dockbar is, you can add as many icons in as you like. You’ll be able to scroll thru them horizontally. My shortcuts here change quite frequently, I drag shortcuts in & out, depends on which apps I used most often during different time.

The first icon is, again, the shortcut to allow me to go back to my main dock.

The second icon is a folder, which contains my most-used setting dialogs. The main settings dialog has became very crowded, sometimes I forgot where is the settings that I’m looking for. Also for frequently used setting dialogs such as wifi, Bluetooth and battery, I like to access them with as few clicks as possible. Some of the shortcuts here are not available in the app drawer, but you can get it by going Menu à Add à Custom Shortcut à Pick Your Activity à Activities, then look for Settings, expand it and you can see a list of all available dialogs.

The third icon is an app called “My Settings”. A very good app which allows me to switch on/off many battery-draining features quickly. It’s also equipped with a volume controller. Some of its features has been duplicated in other places, but this app has helped me a lot in my previous HTC Sense.

Notification Bar

Cyanogen’s notification bar (the bar on top) consists of a useful power management “widget”. The widget can be configured in Settings à CyanogenMod Settings à User Interface à Notification Power Widget. Choosing from the predefined list, you can choose to display up to 6 buttons. Mine is: GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, hotspot, 3G and sync.

Secondly, I have the battery percentage displayed on top of the battery icon. This way I have more precise information about the battery level. More settings on the notification bar can be found in Settings à CyanogenMod Settings à User Interface à Status Bar.

Homepages

Now about the shortcuts on the home pages. First, I've hid the label display of the icons, because I can recognize all of them without the label, I find the labels wasting space. Secondly, I changed it to 5 columns and 7 rows, so that the icons look more packed, and I can put more things on the pages.

My main home page has only 4 shortcuts. I want a blank main home page because I want to see my wallpaper clearly. That’s the whole reason I put up my favorite wallpaper after all.

The first icon is an app called “Bookmark Home”. It displays your bookmarked websites as icons in a home-style itself. I find it pretty cool and easy to navigate. I put this here so that I can access my favorite websites really quickly.

The second icon is an app called “Hertz”. It’s a simple voice recorder. I like its auto-save feature over the bundled recorder: I’d not like to miss a precious moment while I’m touching around to save my previous recorded sound, I can always do housekeeping later to clean unwanted files. I put it here because I want super-fast access to this app, because people don’t wait for me to launch this app before they start talking. This is also the same reason I put the next 2 shortcuts in my main home page.

The third and forth icons are the camera in video and picture mode, respectively. The video mode camera is not available in the app drawer, but you can get it in Menu à Add à Custom Shortcut à Pick Your Activity à Activities, then look for the Camera icon, expand it, then select Camcorder.

Utilities, Organizers and Games

Then scrolling to the left, I have my group of utilities, organizers and games shortcuts. In this page:

• Microphone: use my phone as a microphone, output directly to an amplifier, or to my computer for recording.
• IP Webcam: use the camera on my phone as a webcam for my computer, including using it for video chats such as in Skype.
• Paint Joy: a kids’ painting program, but I find it useful for drawing sketches during discussion. 
• My Letter: creates hand writing graphics. Not really practical but I just find it cool.
• Moon+ Reader: my favorite e-book reader.
• Ringdroid: lets me trim my MP3s before setting it as my ringtone.
• Barcode Scanner: QR and barcode scanner. It also allows me to create my own QR code from any text.
• ShootMe: do screen capture.
• TxtPad: my favorite text file editor.
• Camera360: a powerful camera, for normal shooting as well as post processing effects. I don’t use it as my primary camera app because for its slow startup. But it could be fun in certain situation.
• Radio: well, radio.
• MortPlayer: way better than the default music player. Tons of features including alarm. You really have to test this out if you haven’t already done so.
• Gallery: the default picture viewer. Not my preference in terms of practicality, I leave it here because it looks cool and it lets me view my Picasa photos directly.
• QuickPic: the practical picture view. Best of it is, it lets me hide a folder to prevent it from showing as an “album” elsewhere (by creating the “nomedia” file.
• FxCamera: a camera that lets you create funky picture effects. Just fun.
• Torch: The life saver during a blackout in the night.
• Calculator.
• GTask: simple to-do task list. Just enough for me to quickly create tasks without too many touches and typing. Not too much, not to less.
• Calender: bundled. I use it mainly to view dates. Setting appointments with it is simply a pain in the a**: too many questions asked!
• Clock.

The 3 folders at the bottom are, well, one of the most important features in the phone, games. I put only 12 icons in a folder to avoid scrolling. Just in case all of them full – I still have 2 more empty slots ready :P

Internet and Communications

On the right of my main home page, I have my group of Internet and communication apps. In this page:

• News and Weather: bundled. I have to admit I don’t really use it, just put here for the sake of… acting cool.
• Voice Search: Google voice search.
• Browser.
• Flow Free: an alternative to the official Facebook app. It seems to have better notification features. I use it mainly for this function.
• SlideMe: SlideMe app market.
• Google Market.
• GFan: One of the China based largest Android market. You can strangely find many apps that are not available in the official Google Market.
• Google Map.
• Facebook: the official Facebook app. Well, I didn’t use this neither, I usually use browser to browse the desktop version :P I install it purely for its video/photo sharing feature.
• Gmail.
• MSN Talk: the best MSN app I’ve seen so far. Unlike other IM apps, it only allows you to connect to MSN, but it has implemented MSN-specific features best.
• GTalk: the default app.
• SIM Toolkit: to use your telco provider’s SMS info services.
• 2-Way CallRecorder: lets you record your calls in high quality format.
• Tango: for video conferencing 3G calls.
• Phone: the default app.
• Watsapp: for free SMS-like messaging.
• SMS: the default app.
• The following 3 icons are shortcuts created from an app developed by myself :P It’s called QDial. It lets you put your favorite contacts into photo-collage format, and quickly dial by simple touch or long touch. You must try it out!

• Contacts: the default app.
• QNameCard: again developed by me! It lets you digitalize your business name cards. You can swipe thru your cards collection, flip front/back, dial/email directly, etc, you must try it out! :P

Administration and Development

Scrolling right again, I have my group of administration and development apps. In this page:

• Any Cut: create custom shortcuts.
• Remote RDP: remote desktop connection.
• androidVNC: Real VNC connection.
• PRemoteDroid: controlling your computer’s mouse and keyboard thru LAN connection. It’s cool and perfect for Power Point presentation!
• Dev Tools: bundled app that helps simulating environments for application development.
• ADB Wireless: when activated, it allows you to ADB into your phone using wireless LAN.
• GScript Lite: create Linux script batch jobs.
• Terminal Emulator: run Linux scripts.
• aLogcat: view system log.
• Shark: capture network traffics.
• PhoneUsage: keeps track and analyze my wifi and 3G data usage.
• Root Explorer: explorer system files with root user rights.
• Disk Usage: analyze app storage and SD card usage. I use it to find large files in my storage easily.
• Superuser: manage apps that use the root user rights.
• ES Task Manager: kill running apps and services.
• My Settings: as described earlier.
• ROM Manager: checks and installs ROM updates.
• Titanium Backup: great app to backup my apps and system data.

Other Tips

• To quickly create a shortcut of your app, go to App Drawer, locate the app, long press.
• To quickly uninstall your app, long press on the icon, drag to the top “Trash” bar, hold it and wait for a second. Messages will popup saying “Application will be uninstalled.” Now drop it.
• The notification bar shows the current time. What if you want to find out today’s date? Simply drag down the notification bar, notice that the left side of the bar now display today’s date.
• Ever wondering where is the file you received via Bluetooth? Create a “Bluetooth Received” shortcut folder: Menu à Add à Folders à Bluetooth Received.
• To visit your recently launched app without jumping back to home? Long press the Home button. You can also set the number of recent apps shown at Settings à CyanogenMod Settings à Input Settings à Long-Press Home Settings à Number of Recent Apps.
• Stuck in an un-responding app? Long press the back button to kill it instantly. You can enable this in Settings à Application Settings à Development à Stop app via long press.

Besides using cable, there’re other ways to exchange files with your computer.

• Bluetooth. Once paired and after some setup using OBEX, you can browse your device’s SD card from your computer easily.
• FTP. You can setup a FTP server on your device, my preference for this is an app called “FTPServer”, and then access from your computer using any FTP client such as FileZilla. LAN is required thou.
• Using LAN. I find this the most convenient way. As long as both your device and computer are in the same LAN, you can simply browse the network folders using tools like ES File Explorer.

They are FREE

Just in case you are wondering, yes all apps listed above are free, some are ads supported, but free. I have not spent a single cent in buying apps. I really appreciate the hard work done by the developers. Some of the apps above are really great, I wish I’ll have some spare time to write more about them in the future. Till then, cya.