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.