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> Review :: iLauncher, Rating 3.5 out of 5
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post Mar 17 2006, 09:25 AM
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iLauncher
By SBSH Mobile Software
MGN Rating -

Rating Legend

1 star: Find something else; save your money
2 star: Below average; not recommended
3 star: Average; performs as advertised but not inspiring
4 star: Good; worth the money
5 star: Great; best of its kind on the market

Review by Slacker
Review Date / March 17th, 2006

Note: Screen captures are created with Pocket Controller-Professional by Soti, Inc.

Geeks are tweakers by design. The desire to make the coolest gadget even cooler is overwhelming. In the Windows Mobile world a lot of time and effort go into what you display on and can do from the coveted Home screen. There are thousands upon thousands of web pages that talk about or show products for customizing and improving the Home Screen. Why? Because people look at the Home screen as an expression of the person that carries the device. It says "I need a LOT of information!" or "Look how colorful I am". The information may mean nothing to the casual observer, but to the device owner it represents all that is important, sacred if you will.

iLauncher is a new utility that allows you to build out and customize a portion of your Home screen in an effort to make you more productive. In a nutshell it is a shortcut bar. But it's capabilities allow you to completely configure it to your liking to give you quick access to the information, applications and documents you need.

Here is what SBSH Mobile Software has to say about iLauncher:

QUOTE
Customize your Pocket PC the way you want it to look
  • Four different display modes: Tabbed, Sliding classic, One tab display and No tabs
  • Add icons to each of your tabs for a much better looking display
  • Customize shortcuts order and size. Support both large shortcut icons and small shortcut icons
  • Add meters to tabs: Memory, Battery, File Store, SD Card, CF Card and backup battery
  • All of iLauncher icons support both regular BMP files and TGA files. Display TGA icons with half-transparency levels for a better look on various today themes
  • Create tray icons tab to display shortcuts on your device bottom tray bar
  • Easier browsing to your files with links directly to common folders on your Pocket PC
  • Rearrange, add, remove, and name tabs
  • Add shortcuts to control panel applets
  • iLauncher can be installed on main memory, built in storage or storage card, keeping memory usage in mind. iLauncher core dll is only 200kb!


When I first installed iLauncher iLauncher I got a bar at the very top of my screen that looks like this:

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My first thoughts was "Oh great... now I have a messed up screen and will have to restore from backup..." But like all good users (right) I looked at the documentation and found out that is a feature of iLauncher. If you press and hold on that bar you see this menu:

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The bar is a meter, and can display any one of the battery or memory usage meters. Mine is displaying my main battery, but you can make it display any one of the available meters.

This is the main iLauncher display, and the defauly display option includes tabs, like the Apps, Games and Docs tabs in the example screenshot above. We will discuss the other view options later. Right now I will focus on the actual functions and icons of iLauncher.

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Notice how some icons are larger than others? They are all just icons, but some are dynamic and actually represent meters like the one on top of the screen. Clicking on them takes you to their respective applications, regardless of whether they are meter icons or just shortcuts. If you click a meter, you get a pop-up screen with current status information like this:

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You can click and hold an icon to get a context sensitive menu like this:

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You can even add the option to have the icon give you a NEW option which will use the selected application and automatically create a new blank document or file for you.

Notice I can change the size to either small (32x32) or large (64x64). I also have the option to easily move or copy the icons from tab to tab, delete the icon, and change the parameters or add special commands to the launch of the application the icon represents.

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Clicking on a tab, games in this case, shows you the applications in that tab:

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It is important to note, the tabs that iLauncher displays are NOT the same as any custom program folders you may have created on the START menu. And you can customize the tabs right on the Home screen by dragging and dropping icons from tab to tab. If you have more tabs than will show on the screen scroll arrows automatically appear, and you can add a caption to each tab that will help label it; handy when you use the same icon for multiple tabs.

Another feture is the ability to echo one of your iLauncher tabs to the shell tray. The shell tray is circled in the image below, and it has my APPS tab echoed there:

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Ok, so iLauncher is a Home screen shortcut bar. That is pretty easy to understand. But the real test of any Homescreen plugin is the ability to customize and accessorize right? Let's see what the configuration options are for iLauncher. To get to the settings screens click the configuration button:

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There are eight main configuration items:
  • General Settings
  • Horizontal Tab Mode Settings
  • iLauncher Options Settings
  • Meter Settings
  • Fullscreen Settings
  • Colors
  • Captions
  • Tweaks
And each main configuration has several options to choose from. For example, clicking GENERAL SETTINGS gives you a sub-category list of 20 configuration items. Clicking on just the first one, iLauncher Default Display Mode gives you four possible display modes. The configuration possibilities are virtually limitless.

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Your tabs and shortcuts are configured here as well. You can add and remove both tabs and shortcuts, and shortcuts can have extra configuration information added to them as well.

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This review would be far too long if I were to go through every possible display option. and honestly I couldn't completely cover the possibilities anyway. You are really limited by your imagination and creative genious. The thing that really sets iLauncher apart is the support for skinning. There are hundreds of posts in the SBSH support forums that share other people's creations for icon sets for iLauncher. Here is just one example (by Juko, taken from here):

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If you are graphically skilled you can use the Skinning Guide to create your own dynamic meter icons for iLauncher as well.

So is that all iLauncher is? Not at all. iLauncher also comes with a fullscreen mode that can replace your existing programs manager. This is what it looks like. Notice the tabs from the Home screen are echoed here:

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The one thing that puzzles me about iLauncher is this fullscreen mode. There are many configuration options that drive the look and feel of the Home screen plugin, but the configuration for the fullscreen mode is very limited:

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So that's a quick look at iLauncher, a Home screen shortcut bar that gives you complete control over its look and feel. But how does it compare to other similar products? It is true there are are other applications that allow you to add shortcuts to the homescreen. Battery Bar Pro by Omega One gives some similar function, but it comes with a lot more capability and a much higher pricetag. iLauncher is exclusively a shortcut bar and it does a very good job of allowing customization to meet your Home screen needs. So if you are looking for a shortcut bar for your homescreen be sure to check it out. But if you need additional functionality beyond shortcuts you may want to look at other options.

You can download a trial for iLauncher from here and purchase the full version here.


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Jim Cleek (Slacker)
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