Same here - the icons are way too big for me. I have very good eyes and I love having a lot of info on my screen. On my Windows 7 machine I can set the icon size just how I want it. Isn’t that what computers (including phones) should be? Customizable to anyone’s needs? There’s more than one reason I don’t buy Apple products, but in this case the important one is that I’d like to be in control. I want to make the most of the screen real estate.
Weird that although I have good eyes I don’t have a problem with the sharpness. I don’t have a massive number of apps but the icons I do have on my home screen are very clear. Inconsistent with the Latest Used and Most Used apps, yes.
A much easier way to get the old layout back in 1.8 is to just load the “Fairphone Launcher” from the Play Store. It’s the old launcher, so everything can be arranged as before, while still having the rest of the update.
Alternatively (if you don’t want to trust the person who re-packaged the old launcher for Play Store, but don’t want to build it from source yourself) you can open some older software image .zip file, grab FairPhoneHome.apk from the /system/app folder and install that.
Remember to re-disable installation from unknown sources in Settings -> Security afterwards.
Mmmm, first post on the forum, first moan. I DO NOT want to fiddle and I really don’t like the big icons. The inconsistency between the views is the worse of it.
The aesthetics of it is a rather personal thing, but I don’t like it…
this is it. it is not a matter of taste. the icons are hazy, not sharp. it’s like having out-of-focus pictures. if the camera app took hazy, unsharp pictures, I’m sure you wouldn’t claim it’s a matter of taste, but rather recognize it as a bug.
I did that and I am happy with the old launcher. How can I rename the two different launchers now? Sometimes my phone asks me which launcher I want to use and they both have the same icon and the same name.
I just wonder: Is it possible to delete the new launcher, if you have installed the old one?
It is great, that you came up with this! Thank you for sharing it with us, I did not know, that it was even possible to extract something from the Fairphone-Zips.
Then don’t install custom launchers and stick with what’s tried and tested. If all you care about is going online and reading mail then you don’t need a custom launcher. Now it turns out you care about icon DPI as well and, yeah, when you give in to that you stray from the beaten path and can’t expect everything to work flawlessly without some effort.
Hmmm… I wonder if you include upgrading to the latest FP OS in ‘straying from the beaten path’? I can assure you that after upgrading to 1.8 it did take me ‘some effort’ to get everything to work flawlessly
And I think tin’s post was a slightly ironic reply to @Stefan 's comment that 'You are supposed to play around." Again, I guess we all have to make allowances and remember that many of us have English as our second language only. Stefan’s comment might be read as ‘You have the opportunity to play around’ but could, at worst, also be read as ‘We expect you to do a lot of tweaking if you want your FP to function properly’. Personally I’m convinced that the former is was Stefan meant.
My sentence was meant a bit ironic, and your paraphrase is correct. Take the chance to tweak and empower yourself!
Also (going off topic), I think, that with FP not coming pre-installed with Google Apps, there is no guarantee by FP that everything must go right with installing Google Apps, for instance. In my opinion, it is your own responsibility if you choose to install Google Apps.
But surely that’s stretching it rather far, isn’t it? After all, FP is delivered with the Play Store Install widget, which also appears on the home screen immediately after first boot? So users are inclined to believe that access to the play store can be taken for granted.
And while I sympathise with the OpenSource movement and also believe that Google shows a considerate lack of respect for people’s privacy, I also believe that an Android phone without access to the play store will have a rather limited market segment.
I agree that for most people Google Apps will be a buying decision. On the other hand I want to emphasize again, that Google Apps integrates way too much with the original Android system and therefore is prone to issues. Why does Google have to integrate that deep? Why can’t it stay inside its ordinary user apps?
