Nova Launcher beta receives a huge Material Design overhaul, tons of new features
It's no news that Nova Launcher, one of the most popular and feature-packed launchers on Google Play, has been donning a slew of Material Design aftertaste for some time now (in the shape of animations, a card-styled app drawer, etc.), but it's the most recent update to the beta version that really brings a serious redesign to the well-known home screen replacement.
That's not all - a ton of new features have made their way to Nova, while many of the available ones have been further improved.
Starting from the app itself, which is now more colorful and vivid than before, and moving on to the customizability settings for the home screens, the app drawer, and almost anything you can think of, we can notice major improvements on all fronts.
Here's a sort of an official changelog that will give you an idea of what the new version of Nova Launcher beta has in store:
- Full Material Design
- All settings screens and dialogs are material style
- More animations
- Google Search from the search bar shows as an overlay
- Edit Shortcut dialog, and quick menu, tinted based on colors of the icon
- New icon
- New Nova Action icons
- Rebased on top of Launcher3
- Individual icon layout settings (size, font, etc) in Desktop, Drawer, Dock, Folder
- Max icon size boosted to 150%
- Widget Search
- Pull to search (pull down in the drawer to open app or widget search)
- Widgets given their own drawer, removed from App Drawer
- Ability to change Page Indicator color
- Drawer Tab Bar completely optional
- Support for Android for Work managed profiles (Lollipop)
- Workaround Expand Notifications Nova Action not working on Samsung Lollipop
- Requires Android 4.1 or higher (Dropped support for Android 4.0 ICS)
- Unlimited desktop pages (previously limited to 9)
- Easy add/remove of desktop pages by dropping icons on the blank page, or removing all icons from a page
- Add blank desktop pages (for gestures or live wallpapers) from overview
- Improved bulk edit of folders (Folder > Menu > Select Apps)
- Added shadows to unread badges
- Unread Badge size scales with icon size
- Allow reordering drawer folders by drag/drop within window
- Added Roboto-Medium font option
- Improve handling of apps installed to SD card
Impressive, right? Said features are only available in the beta now (you can get it from the source link), but most of them will certainly make their way to the full-blown version of the popular Android launcher.
source: APKMirror via @KevinBarry
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