SBSH iLauncher 2.1

Supplier:SBSH Mobile software
Product:iLauncher 2.1
Cost: $8.95 Free for existing version 2 users.

SBSH iLauncher jumps to version 2.1 and throws in a massive amount of features for a minimal price! Check out this review and see if you agree with me that this is the launcher of choice.

Read on for more...







iLauncher 2.1 Features

• Customer Shortcuts and tab icons with alpha blending support.
• New tabs display mode.
• Large Icon (64x64) True VGA support.
• Unlimited number of shortcut lines.
• iLauncher Meters (battery and memory)
• Icons for PocketPC Settings
• Full screen Launcher.
• Taskbar icon shortcuts.
• Three different display modes - sliding classic, tabbed and one tab.

iLauncher does one job, and it does it very, very well indeed. It places icon shortcuts to almost anything on your device right on the today screen. You can have multiple tabs, large or small icons, icons for individual settings applets or even individual documents. There are of course a multidude of options that I'll discuss in a moment.

Where this product truly shines is in it's embrace of the tweakers, offering full skinning and alpha blending support throughout the application. This leads to some very creative and inspiring skin designs from some very talented people. More on that later.

There is very few things I enjoy more than spending time with an application that lets me control where things are and how they look. It's like building a custom interface to your device without any programming knowledge.






There is a trial version available that I encourage you to get from here
The download is dial-up friendly 1.2MB containing the PC setup file and cabs for users who prefer that method of installation.

The installation itself is easy and iLauncher can be installed to main memory, internal storage or an external storage card. The application's core dll file is a small 200kb file so it won't take a large, hungry bite of your memory either.

Once installed three default tabs appear on your today screen. These are Apps, Games and Documents and serve as an example of what can be added. The plug-in automatically resides on the bottom of the today screen, but this can be adjusted to your position liking through the today settings panel.

If you are like me the first thing you will do is look at the options and settings and take some time to evaluate the differences each makes, but let's do that later and instead add an icon shortcut to the Apps tab to see how easy it is.

This is achieved by tapping the little icon to the left of the Apps tab icon, doing this opens up the shortcuts tab automatically and allows you to move icons up and down aswell as remove icons completely and add new ones. For this example lets add an icon to the bluetooth configuration panel.

Tap on the Add button, then from the file select window tap on the drop down arrow and navigate to 'control panel applets' from this selection choose 'Bluetooth'. Tap on the select button to return to the shortcuts settings and now tap ok. That's how easy it is to add icon shortcuts to iLauncher. Another option in the shortcuts tab is to make the icon a large icon. On my QVGA Device this produces a 32x32 pixel icon which is ideal for tapping with your finger!

You'll see this process in the animated screen shot to the right.


Ok, now that we know how to add icons let's look at some of the other options available within the iLauncher settings. Again tapping the settings icons opens the Shortcuts tab, tap on the Options tab to access the program settings.

There's a lot of options here so let me take you through a sample of them. Tapping the iLauncher Display Mode allows you to choose from a drop down box any one of three choices for the display. You can have Classic iLauncher (3-tab), One Tab Display, or Horizontal Tab Display. To decide which you like best a little experimentation is advisable. I personally like the animated switching with the classic version but this takes up too much space on me, and the one tab display needs a tap n' hold to switch tabs so I have settled for the default horizontal display.





Other settings include the position of the tabs, top or bottom and with or without names and icons. Tab minimum width, name alignment, and font size for tabs.

Lets look at little closer at the option for Icon arrangement, this feature has four options and essentially controls how the icons are displayed on the today screen. For example, if you have just four icon shortcuts on the tab and you choose to 'spread' the alignment then the tabs are positioned equally across the screen width. The other options are left aligned, centered or right aligned. One caveat applies, in that if you use large icons then the alignment is always set to left.




iLauncher also contains options for controlling the number of shortcut rows allowed on the today screen, the options range from 1 row to 10 rows or to 'automatically determine' which will increase the number of rows to accomadate the number of icons that you want to display.

Spacing between icons can be increased or decreased by a couple of pixels which is handy if you want to use your fingers to tap as it reduces the chance that you'll an adjacent icon by mistake.

Tab animation can be enabled or disabled which is really more appropraite to the display modes discussed earlier.

You can turn off the option to display the file icons while you are browsing your devices file system from within iLauncher, there is a speed benefit gained if you turn it off, but I suspect that most people prefer the visual icon indicator when browsing.



Snap-back tab lets you control iLaunchers behaviour when you have launched a shortcut, you can make iLauncher display any of your available tabs, or to remain on the chosen tab.

Shell tray tab is an excellent feature, you can have shortcut icons appear in the task bar area of your PocketPC device, that's right on the bottom of the screen. This is really cool acutally, as most of the time this bar shows only a few icons at most. The options for this feature allow you to control which tab will have it's icons appear on the task bar. I found it best to set up another tab and put the shortcuts I want on the task bar into the tab. Otherwise I had too many icons for the display. From my little test I can get 8 shortcuts into the task bar, but this will differ from device to device.

Other options.
Fill tray in reverse order, allows you to show the icons in the task bar from right to left, instead of left to right.

Show command centre, puts an icon in the task bar that allows tap n' hold adjustments to iLauncher.






Auto Minimise, this is another excellent and space saving feature. Enabling this feature will shrink iLauncher off the today screen, to restore it you tap on the command centre icon and choose maximize, once you have chosen your shortcut iLauncher again shrinks off the today screen.

Refresh Screen after minimize, forces the today screen to refesh because of a known error on certain devices that fails to update the screen correctly.

Refresh Automatically after loading. This allows you to control when iLauncher will acutally load after a soft reset. It can help when too many applications are trying to start when you soft reset. You can choose from half a second to five second delay.

Preferred Fullscreen tab. Another exclusive iLauncher feature is the full screen launcher, and this option allows you to choose the default tab shown when you open the fullscreen panel.





Remember File Browse Path, is useful when you are navigating for shortcuts and want to choose more than one from the same location. This option saves you from have to navigate to the same path again.

Enable True VGA Mode. This is an option for VGA Device owners and it's my only real issue with this application, as there's nothing to prevent me selecting it on my QVGA Device and having done so I can only recommend to other QVGA device owners to not choose this option as it will cause display problems on your device.

Enable true VGA mode in options is a follow on from the previous option. Even seeing these options here and knowing the VGA skins that are available, really makes me want a VGA device, - hurry up HTC!

The last option is to defer loading of icons. This can help with performance.






What Else can it do?

Well you can have up to 22 different tabs on your today screen, these can be represented by an individual icon for each tab and shown without the name which helps to present as many as possible within the width of the display.

Fullscreen mode, is represented by an icon on the default Apps tab or added as a link to any tab. This feature allows you to have a full screen launcher for your applications. The tab shown first is controlled by options as mentioned previously, but I decided to show all tabs. I did find one odd thing in this feature and that's when I launch fullscreen mode and then tap the title bar, the mode switches to the topmot tab display, if I tap the title bar again then fullscreen mode minimzes then maximizes again automatically.

Custom icons. If you don't like a particular icon that's displayed for your shortcut or your tabs you can change it to another one. Tap settings and find the shortcut you want to change, tap the image button and navigate to the folder containing the icons. This will display a list of available icons and you can tap them to select them. You can see from the shot to the right that I've used some of PocketInformant's icons but there are vastly more available on the forums at SBSH.






Lastly then is the customisation and skinning capabilities. I am really in awe of the capabilities and talents of developers who take skinning seriously. It's mostly a labour of love as some of the skins are freely available. I'd imagine the skinners feel happy when they see their skins on others devices or in screen shots in reviews eh? Well then it's really only appropraite that I show you some of the resources designed and developed with SBSH in mind and released firstly on the iLauncher forum. I've had to shrink the shots here but happily if you click on it you'll get the full picture.


Conclusion
iLauncher sets the bar very high for others to reach. The quality of the development is high and the product has been very well tested. This is a great program and full of all the features you think you'll need in a launcher, it's easy to configure and tweak and works very well without slowing down the device. If I could ask for more it would be the ability to use collections of icons like a skin pack that could be applied via one or two taps.

I know from discussions with Amit that further development is planned and there will be further updates shortly.

For
• Very skinnable.
• Small size.
• Multiple Tabs and tab icons.
• True VGA support.
• Shortcuts for almost anything on your device.
• Fast!
• Tray launch icons.

Against
• Too easy to set VGA Mode on a QVGA Device which can cause problems.
• Image selection navigation is a little arkward.
• No shortcuts for common system utilities such a reset, power off, screen rotate.




4WM Rating 95%