Android App of the Day: GDE home app

Preamble: I've been playing with alternative Android ROMs on the HTC Magic for several months now. In that time I've seen the very good, the adequate, the not-so-good, the bad....and the downright ugly.

One of things i do like is a lean, clean functional user interface. The sort that is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The sort that let's you get stuff done instead of making you do stuff.

Clearly tastes differ as some people love the HTC "Sense UI" found on the HTC Hero and the HTC Magic 32A. That's the Magic with 96MB more (288MB) system RAM than the HTC Magic 32B (192MB) from Vodafone and others. Sense UI on the Magic 32B is a bloated waste of a phone. If you actually use the huge clock and weather and Twitter widgets, your phone runs like a one-legged dog on valium.

There are many alternatives to the default Home app on android. I've tried aHome lite, and Open Home. I liked Open Home enough that I bought the paid version and used it more or less daily for a reasonable time. Like anything on the phone, I turn off the bits I don't use or want or the bits I like, but they use up resources I want for things I like more.....and Open Home offers you scope to tune it significantly. It also has many, many themes, including some very cool ones.

But it still felt slower than the default Home app and, in the end, I returned to Home with my tail between my legs.

I'm sorry I ever doubted you, Default Home.

Until today.

Cutting to the chase: Today I saw on Twitter a random tweet from a random tweeter saying the cube transition in GDE home looked good. "Click"...I went to the Android market and bought it (It's cheap)..and had it running in a couple of minutes.  I quickly added a Google Chrome GDE theme from the market.

I'm impressed. GDE is fast, stable, well-designed and enables me rather than getting in my way. At the same time GDE can be very appealing to the eye and just plain fun to look at. The transitions are fast and smooth, unlike some on android. Now I know for certain any flakey, uneven transitions are due to programming, not the phone.

GDE offers three transitions from one screen to another: cube, stretch and fade. The image to the left is the cube transition in action. I very much prefer cube.

Stretch actually makes me fell vaguely queasy, though I'm sure some will love it.

Fade is cool, too, though not as assertive a statement about "Movin' to the next screen now!" as cube is.

Visually, GDE is a very polished app. There is nothing remotely messy or unfinished about it. I've tried several themes - some free and some paid, including this garish but fun Google Chrome one - and they are all very well put together.

The app tray opens to reveal all apps, but it also includes two (configurable) buttons. By default the dialer is invoked from the left and the dialog for adding shortcuts, widgets, folders and wallpapers kicks off from the right. It's quite different in many ways to the way the default Home app works (or even Open Home)...but after a few minutes, I found myself thinking it made a lot of sense to do it the GDE way.

The Menu button brings up a substantially re-designed and streamlined menu with only three options on it: Applications, Finder and Control Panel.

The first is obvious. It's apps. It works like the Apps tray. The second, Finder, kicks off Google Search. The Control Panel is the most powerful of the three, providing access to four sub-options:

General Phone Settings: the wifi, bluetooth and all that good stuff.

Personalise appearance: The cosmetic stuff; transitions and themes.

Desktop settings: The UI behaviour stuff, like how many home screens, which one is the default, rotation / orientation, finger swiping and what things look like when you're in the middle of moving an icon (ghosting the icons - or not).

It would be a waste if any of this was slow.....but it isn't. If anything, on my HTC Magic 32B, it's faster than the default Home app.....and GDE doesn't get in my way. The menus makes sense and the response is uniformly immediate.

Can't ask for anything more than that.

Here's a wee vid of GDE. Sorry about the quality. I'll try to work out how to get the focus stable for any future such vids.