I have no good excuse for this. I’m really not sure why it took me so long to give Xlaunch – an iPhone application launcher from Erica Sadun – a try, but I’m so glad I finally did.
Once you’ve been jailbroken for any decent length of time, you likely end up accumulating quite a few apps, and find them spread out over quite a few home screens. This is definitely the case for me. I’ve tried Dock as a launcher in the past, but I find it awkward to hit the right icon as it rainbows them out for me across the screen. So it was very pretty, but not real practical for me. Ever since giving up on Dock, I’d also just given up on launchers generally – until giving Xlaunch a try recently.
I find Xlaunch simple and very effective to use. It presents you with an alphabetical listing of all your programs, with their name and program icon – just like the Contacts view. It lets me flick through all my applications alphabetically, or jump to a specific letter quickly via the alphabet slider on the right-hand side of its screen, just as you can in the Contacts app.
You can also swap to a CoverFlow presentation of all your programs just by turning the iPhone to Landscape orientation. I’d really like to see this feature be there, but in the same Portrait screen orientation – I find it awkward to have to turn it over to use this, and also most apps will launch in portrait view, so I’d prefer to just work that way with the launcher.
Xlaunch also lets you launch any of your webclips you’ve saved down to a home screen, which is very cool – means you can use it to launch anything contained on any of your home screens.
It doesn’t offer to group programs into categories or anything like that (as I’ve seen on launchers for other Mobile platforms) – but with the iPhone’s ability to scroll and flick so quickly through even quite a long list, I don’t feel like I want or need that ability.
Xlaunch also does not offer any options to hide program icons from the Springboard. There are other apps out there that will accomplish that if you want it, and again I don’t feel as if I miss that sort of feature.
Overall, I like Xlaunch a whole bunch and now have it on my first (main) home screen, so it’s easy to get to quick – and it helps me get to everything else quickly. Like I said, don’t know why it took so many months to finally give it a shot, but I’ll definitely be sticking with it.
What are your favorite methods for launching apps?
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