He alluded to this before, but developer Federico Carnales – the man behind the Android launcher alternative LauncherPro (Plus) – has officially announced his plans to begin building LauncherPro from the ground up. Everyone may ask “why? It works perfectly fine as it is.” While a great app, LauncherPro’s shortcomings come into play where the app is built on top of the stock Android 2.0 launcher. It wasn’t designed to support what Federico has done and wants to do in the future so he often has to provide hacky solutions when he goes to implement new features.
While the outcome has been tremendous, code can get a bit tricky and optimization and flexibility becomes a problem (I’ve seen the endless amount of comments in the Android market regarding how instable LauncherPro can get over time.) Here’s the full list of what Federico hopes to achieve with his undertaking:
- Improved speed
- Reduced memory usage, which means fewer force-closes and possibly allow us to have up to 9 homescreens
- Increased flexibility. I’m coding everything to make it as flexible as possible, which will allow LauncherPro to better adapt to new device form factors, such as tablets.
- Cleaner code that I’ll know inside and out. That means that adding new features can be implemented faster since I’ll know every single line of code in LauncherPro.
- Rewriting the app will give me the opportunity to fix the little bugs that haven’t been addressed yet, and to improve parts of the code that could use some improvement.
It makes a lot of sense now that I think about it, and I’m excited for the future of the app (not that I already wasn’t, but this should allow him to break even more ground than he already has.) Federico has stated that while LauncherPro (Plus) development won’t come to a halt as he goes into “code monkey mode” to get his own engine running, updates won’t be as frequent as they have been in recent weeks. That’s a small price to pay if you consider how bright the future is for this app.
He also states that Plus users won’t need to repurchase the app once it’s been remade: it’ll still be the LauncherPro you loved and paid for. Be on the lookout for yet another update to the current app within the next few days which adds a new feature for Plus users and brings some bug fixes.
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