Ugh, quite annoying. My next phone might be an Android (instead of the current iPhone), and I was looking forward to returning to Nova Launcher, after having used it many years ago as my favorite launcher. This feels like a big no-go now.
What are other good customizable launchers on Android nowadays?
Much less popular but I switched to Kvaesitso from Nova about a month ago and it's been amazing and it's open source. Much more opinionated than Nova but it matched how I used Nova so I really enjoy it.
I've been using lawnchair as a launcher that is open source (apache) since the first news broke months when the previous dev/owner warned people what was coming, and it works just fine. Not quite as versatile as Nova Launcher, but with 100% less adware now that the new adware company is running up in people with a bait and switch.
Early on, Lawnchair implemented a blacklist to hide apps they deemed “bad”. They only removed it after lots of protest from users. That has “burned” this launcher for me.
I tried Lawnchair out when figuring out what I was going to replace Nova with. I didn't end up choosing it, but if I had known they tried to do this (even if it only made it to the alpha channel) I wouldn't have even bothered to try it out.
I'm certainly not going to say nobody should use it.
But I assume the dev then is the dev now. That he was OK introducing something like that, even 9 years ago, tells me that his values and my values are very far apart.
I did actually evaluate it (before I knew this history) and it didn't meet my needs, so I chose something else purely on technical grounds anyway.
I used Nova for years and went through this research before, having tested many alternatives. Octopi is what you're looking for. It can do pretty much everything Nova did for me and more besides. They also update often with improvements and fixes!
Lawnchair newest beta, though they still didnt fix years old bug with dark/black font on dark/black background in folders/drawer
also resizing/padding widgets ain't as good as Nova, but for sure much better than Octopi which is completely weird, tried yesterday, chaotic settings, can't even disable background picture for dock
switched yesterday to Lawnchair from Nova after 10+ years, seems OK besides those few quirks, but still keeping Nova as backup, will see after 2 weeks testing how is the stability, if I can remove even nova backup
I paid for "Square Home" a couple years ago and I'm very happy with it. It's highly customizable. The Windows Phone style layout probably isn't for everyone but it works well for me.
Same! And I feel weird about it. The only issue I have is sometimes the task switcher hangs or fails and I can't easily switch tasks, but aside from that it ticks a lot of boxes.
Yeah, I used to have an issue where it would repeatedly request accessibility permissions even though they were already granted. But I haven't seen that one in months and haven't noticed any other glitches or bugs whatsoever.
I like how completely adjustable the home screen grid is (icon size, number of rows, number of columns, whether or not to allow sub-grid arrangement, whether to have vertical or horizontal page layout).
I like the number of shortcut gestures available (tap home on home screen, swipe up/down, two finger swipe up/down, double tap, double tap + swipe up/down, pinch in/out), and that they're all completely remappable to launch any installed app, or installed app quick action, or trigger any of like a dozen launcher actions (like opening the app drawer, opening the notification shade, locking the screen, etc).
I like how the dock can be swiped up to show a second (or, if you want, third or fourth etc) row of apps in like a "mini app drawer" just for things I use often and want there instead of picking a page where they live.
I like the widgets that it ships with (I use the combo clock + weather one).
I like that I can have the app drawer organize alphabetically (or not, if I wanted).
I like that I can turn off pretty much anything that I don't want (the news feed page, especially, but also you can have almost any of the launcher UI elements hidden by default).
And it's stable, has no ads, and nearly no pop-ups. It just lets me set what I want and then gets out of the way and works 99.9% of the time.
It's just... It's Microsoft Launcher, is the only thing.
I was also surprised to not see Photomator included. Wouldn’t it perfectly complement the lineup? I hadn’t thought of such a pessimistic interpretation, but now I’m worried as well …
I think Apple killed Aperture primarily because it was confusing to have iPhoto and Aperture with largely overlapping workflows. Aperture had the loupe view, and side by side comparison stuff, saved color grading tools (I think?), sure, but it wasn’t differentiated enough to justify a Pro designation. I think it makes more sense for Photomator features to be absorbed into Photos… and maybe Photos gets some new Pixelmator integrations if you have it, for quick touch ups / enhancement type things.
On the other hand, Final Cut / iMovie will exist side by side because it’s truly a basic vs Pro situation.
Not a product manager at Apple, of course, but this is what logically seems to make sense.
Uff, I sure hope you are wrong! I don’t want to use the iCloud library for photos, but have my photos available as digital files elsewhere on the ssd. Of course, your prediction makes more sense from Apple’s standpoint, unfortunately.
I do like the convenience of iCloud, but totally agree that having them safe elsewhere is necessary. I’ve been pretty bad about keeping solid, non-iCloud backups of my photos. I definitely need to be more proactive about it.
Not to a professional, no. But this isn’t iMovie vs Final Cut. Aperture was only slightly above where iPhoto was going in capability. They should have raised the iPhoto/Photos bar a lot more to get back to where Aperture was, though.
I mean, the friendly way to kill off the differences between Aperture and Photos would have been to add all the missing workflow stuff to Photos before killing Aperture. Photos did not get lift-and-stamp edits until late 2022, years after Aperture was discontinued, and it isn't as good as the corresponding feature in Aperture was. Also, it would have been cool if the Photos import from Aperture library had ever worked, even a little bit. I keep an external hard drive around with my old Aperture library because I know it contains photos that Photos.app still hasn't pulled in correctly.
I’m surprised to hear about the bugs. I’ve been using Orion on iOS very happily for a week or so now, and haven’t encountered any issues. I’m actually close to writing a praising blog post for it!
Most of their other posts on the front page also aren’t exactly charismatic (or plain childish). A good early warning sign to stay away from that place!
Have you ever tried a launcher as powerful as Raycast? I can only recommend it. I use it for quick calculations, currency conversions, file lookups, translations, looking up http status codes, joining meetings, finding emojis, quickly checking my calendar, etc. etc. – so, perhaps a singular function might not warrant a launcher, but the sum of functions and keyboard-centric UI make it very valuable for me in my daily workflows.
I wouldn’t even use AI to generate image descriptions (because it doesn’t have enough context to convey the meaning, aside from being wrong many times). Designers and developers should see it as part of their trade to build inclusive products, not try to patch it up as an afterthought with Accessibility overlays or AI-based “fixes”.
I hope so as well! I believe anyone that owns or knows a dog or cat is quite sensitized to the awful noises of fireworks (and straight-up explosives, as they are sometimes used). But I’m afraid too many people are still needlessly fascinated by the spectacle and don’t want things to change.
I do like the idea of having a common and open format for animations. That being said, I see quite a few web devs reaching for Lottie (which will add quite a few hundred kilobytes for the library/wrapper, and some extra ones for each animation), instead of learning more about CSS- and SVG-based animations (which would be a multitude smaller and more easily adjustable). In that sense, I also don’t like how they continuously boast about Lottie’s small size on the main website, while only comparing it to gif and png files (and not mentioning SVG/CSS animations).
I’m sure it is a good fit for usage on native mobile apps, though.
> instead of learning more about CSS- and SVG-based animations
Contrarian opinion: Flash was one of the best things about Web 1.0.
The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.
Flash was all at once a video format, animation format, programming environment, video player, interactive UI system, game programming engine, multiplayer MMO game dev engine, infographics system -- actually, it was literally everything you wanted it to be. And it was so simple that even kids could use it.
If Adobe had opened everything - the format, the player, etc. - it could have become something tremendous that is still with us.
I think there's space for this to be rethought and redone. We shouldn't be so dogmatic that CSS and SVG and HTML and Javascript are the only way. They've had nearly 40 years to shine and we're still struggling with the same issues.
And not just that, it was downloadable. This was huge for me then and even PWAs haven’t caught up (though admittedly are more mutable). It was so nice to be able to download 90% of a webapp for offline use and have it be portable across all my systems as a file. Only JAR files come close nowadays but there’s not really an ecosystem behind that
MPEG-4 was supposed to be the solution, and was quite the bandwagon around 2001 or so. But for whatever reason, the momentum petered out and here we are with a retrograde mess two decades later.
Here for Team Flash. That was an incredible era during its peak. Apple brought on its demise not because it wasn’t competition and Steve Jobs penned the famous criticism which marked the downfall. Flash was ahead of its time.
Steve put the nail in the coffin but the downfall started and was primarily caused by Macromedia being purchased by Adobe, IMHO. All the problems of Flash were solvable had it continued to been driven by a team and leadership that understood and cared about product quality. IMO this is one of the clearest cases of tech acquisition making the world worse.
We need a long documentary about that era. We had video, audio, animation in a web app without the friction of the Netscape browser. There was a burgeoning ecosystem of content producers. Major networks were broadcasting news live in Flash. There was also RealNetworks with real-time audio streaming. This was in late 90’s early 00’s. It was exciting, then http-based everything took over and it felt like media took a ten-year step backwards.
I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses.
Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a massive battery drain, and to get better performance it required punching massive security holes in the browsers.
Flash is only really great as a content creator/developer who doesn’t care about the specifics of delivery.
But it would have phased out anyway regardless of the iPhone. HLS would have killed it for streaming video, advancing JavaScript and web standards would have killed it for more advanced websites.
The only thing we took a step back on was web game delivery.
Eh. I was on dialup in the age you describe and none of that stuff ever worked for me anyway, even for low-bitrate radio the jitter was a killer. HTTP as transport coincided with wide democratization of access, and I don't think that is at all coincidental; by the time bandwidth penetration made broad access to packet-switched ~realtime (ie broadcast equivalent) streaming feasible, HTTP had achieved the required penetration to represent a local minimum.
Flash was one of those things that tried to do too much, and some of its things started being at cross-purposes with each other. The video conflicted with its roots as a vector/animation studio, and that's why Apple famously didn't use it - it ended up being a battery hog.
A lot of interests in web-based video wanted DRM, which meant it was never going to be usable by Free Software.
It was trying to do too much and then the usual corporate mismanagement led to its demise.
Apple famously didn't use it because it didn't sit inside their walled garden and they couldn't put any ads in it, take a cut of every sale, nor charge developers annually for the privilege of building on their property. That's 3 revenue sources that users and developers were skipping out on.
Android phones had Flash support and it worked well enough. Was it desktop-level, of course not. But Android native apps themselves were a mess from a power consumption standpoint until they implemented a JIT compiler in v2.3 "Gingerbread" as well as a task manager that freed up RAM by closing inactive applications. I remember specifically choosing an ASUS android tablet over an iPad because I wanted to use the full web, open multiple tabs at a time and play Flash games, rather than deal with iOS' "one app open at a time" philosophy.
The Internet of 2007 was more than Flash, so of course it had a web browser. It was designed to compete with Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, all of which had web browsers. The App Store didn't even exist before the second iPhone model came out in 2008.
Especially now as web browser vendors are openly trying to get you off the web and into their walled gardens. Apple and Google have no interest in pushing web capabilities forward because they don't see any money from doing that. Mozilla has long since given up, they don't even support "save to homescreen"/"save as web app" functionality.
We're about to enter into a "post-web" era if the tech giants get their way. Smartphones were the first attempt to redefine and capture computing (and are an area where we desperately need antitrust enforcement). Now we'll see AI search and AI chat attempt to circumvent people from finding and using websites.
Mozilla has been rudderless for a decade. They're not going to fix this. The leadership is collecting paychecks being Google's monopoly sponge - distracting the DOJ from antitrust action and refusing to actually innovate in the places that matter.
Search needs to be reigned in. Mobile needs to be reigned in. The coming era of AI chat and search will probably also need a regulatory framework to prevent just a handful of tech companies from owning everything they touch.
Well, that's a part of the problem — it was controlled by a corporation which didn't have any interest in opening it. Therefore it has been excised from the Web.
Unfortunately doing that many things means the codebase must have been rather big. Big enough that auditing and removing licensed code (for instance, the video codecs) seems to be more than they had the stomach for.
It really was a wonderful tool that is still unmatched for creative coding.
How is the modern JS control of DOM elements styled with CSS not the same as ActionScript and Flash sprites. I'd argue that Flash was not a video format. It could play videos encoded in specific codecs, but that's not the same as being a video format. At the end you could wrap MP4 encoded video as an FLV, but that was just a wrapper not a format.
At this point, the only think I see being Flash was the app with its timeline to make the animations visually instead of just with code. I've seen plenty of Show HNs of various apps attempting he animation UI similar to Flash, so I know they are out there. I just have no need for that type of work, so I don't spend too much time with them.
> How is the modern JS control of DOM elements styled with CSS not the same as ActionScript and Flash sprites.
Because DOM is not sprites. Because everything in DOM is laid out with relation to each other, and as you as much as look at it funny, it will cause a full re-paint and re-flow of the entire page. Because animations are bolted on to CSS/DOM after the fact, and the vast majority them are insanely resource-intensive
if you're trying to emulate a Flash element, why would you use CSS relative positioning and not define the position:absolute, at least for the element being used as the stage. That would turn any of the child elements much more sprite-like
> The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.
Hard disagree. Modern web apps can be amazing within the browser alone. Look at Figma or OnShape as class leading examples.
I think you’re also misunderstanding Lottie: For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about. It works well, too, so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
> so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
Because we are.
If you've ever used Flash, you know how easy and accessible it is to create.
The results were 100% portable and even downloadable. You could treat flash files like gifs or pngs.
The web document standards don't work that magically. They have never lived up to what you once could do.
> For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about.
Gross. I want a single, self-contained file that I can open on my computer without having to open a browser. Not an assortment of JavaScripts and css files.
Anything can be a "standard". The web standards are way too big. And they've accumulated decades of baggage.
Didn't you need proprietary flash player to play your flash file? I would rather run my animation/app/game in a browser than install something like that again.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Flash editing environment doesn't have a widely-accepted descendant, and the person you're responding to is right - there's not really a contemporary editor that is as easy - and more importantly: as potentially deep (as it was also shallow) - for non-techies to pick up and work with.
There are plenty of options today for technically-minded or 'computer people' to work with, but there's a dearth of options for the 'merely' creative to play around with and investigate.
A lot of the magic from the 'old' (mid?) web came from people who had very little initial interest in the technical nature of the solution from just going ahead and making Cool Shit™ anyway. Some of those people might then relish getting their hands grubbier and delving deeper into the technical guts (eg. Praystation et al).
- ed : for the record, at the time i was also critical of the proprietary nature of Flash.
I was a "flash developer" for some time around 2005, but the Flash environment (what was it called, Macromedia Flash?) never really "clicked" for me. I was able to put together some interactive visualizations and even little games, but it was not simple for me. That changed when Adobe Flex and ActionScript came along. That's where I felt right at home. But I'm fully aware Flash made much more sense for others than it did for me.
It needed a browser plugin, but as a developer you just needed to reference it in your object/embed tag. It wasn't something you needed to handle yourself. Most people had it installed already anyway.
Funny that you mention Figma because they literally built their own browser around the browser with C++, Rust and WASM because the current browser situation was untenable to the types of applications they wanted to make.
What do you mean by that?
My understanding of the above suggestion is that the author dreamed of a world where something like flash would have become the standard, so part of the browser, without the (proprietary) extension.
The point of Lottie is not simple animations like CSS transitions, but complex arbitrary animations, more like a cartoon than a minor piece of motion.
A good example is the Telegram messenger that uses Lottie as the format of animated stickers, e.g. https://tlgrm.eu/stickers/Princess (click to animate).
Yes, and I think Lottie is very fitting for that use case! I was referring to reaching for Lottie even for simple small animations, because it seems easier to just drop the designer’s Lottie file into the project, rather than building the animation in a more native way. At least I’ve witnessed recommendations like this on Reddit.
Oh, I think I see your meaning. Sure, for trivial translation and rotation, even scaling, I wouldn't expect or want to take a new dependency on the library. But if I already have Lottie in the bundle and a completed example of the animation in Lottie format, how much sense in the general case does it make to reimplement instead of using what I have? It will take pixel peeping and I would most likely do better to spend the same time on something a designer can't also do.
Where it really excels IME is as a target format for design authoring tools, most notably After Effects, which is discussed above the fold in the linked article as the original motivation for the library and the file format. No one is writing stuff like that by hand to begin with.
I've worked with Lottie animations as a mobile app dev, but never authored one.
It’s not trivial to produce a Lottie file in After Effects. 95% of the app’s features are off limits, so it’s practically impossible to take an existing AE project and convert it.
Instead you have to ask an artist to author a project from scratch within Lottie’s limitations, but of course there’s no feedback within AE itself if you’re overstepping the boundaries, so they have to be particularly careful.
I wouldn’t recommend it based on my personal experience. But I guess there are teams who have the diligence to make it work.
The library does this in during runtime, though, if I’m not mistaken? The original commenter is probably referring to a build step that extracts the Lottie content and only leaves JS and SVG in the final output (which is not the case, as the Lottie web player library itself needs to be included as well, to render the animations and provide interactivity APIs during the rendering of the web page).
SVG/CSS needs a browser (SVG doesn't allow embedding fonts, can contains CSS/JS) and it is a flaw. SVG is designed only for embedding into websites. How do I display it in a native application.
Lottie has canvas and svg renderer (that uses CSS transitions where possible, I believe), so technically it's also hardware accelerated (in most cases at least).
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help.
What are other good customizable launchers on Android nowadays?