Let’s start your personalization journey with the background wallpaper. By long-tapping on any blank space on any of your home screens you will be presented with an option to Choose wallpaper from Gallery, Photos, Live Wallpapers and Wallpapers. Gallery is the gallery of images stored on you device. These could be photos you took with the camera or images you have downloaded or were sent.
Photos are photos uploaded privately to your Google + account where crafty features like Highlights and Auto Awesome have been applied.
Wallpapers are images made available on your device as wallpapers.
Live Wallpapers are animated images which either come with the device or have been downloaded from the Google Play Store. You can find many beautiful Live Wallpapers on the Google Play Store. Below for example are two of my favorite Live Wallpaper, Ocean HD and next to it Forest HD. They look great still but animated they are quite beautiful with sunbeams, creatures and dappled light.Ocean HD live wallpaper.
Forest HD live wallpaper.
I change my wallpaper quite often. Sometimes I like an animated wallpaper and other times I find it a bit busy, and wonder about how much battery it is consuming. The nice thing about wallpaper is that it does not interfere with the usability of your device, when you change your wallpaper your device looks different but all your familiar icons are still in the same place.
By the way, you can also configure your Wallpapers by tapping Settings, Display, Wallpaper.Application Icons
Second to the Wallpaper the simplest form of Personalization is selecting which applications you would like to see on which of your home screens. The most used Applications should have pride of place on your home screen. Other screens can be configured with lesser used applications and widgets grouped in such a way as makes sense to you.
A completed list of all your Applications is available in your All Apps screen which can be accessed via the All Apps icon at the center of your Favorites Tray at the bottom of every home screen. (The All Apps icon is the six dots surrounded by a circle.) To add an Application to a home screen just navigate to the All Apps screen, locate the Application, long press the Application until it gives a buzz, then drag it to the space where you would like it to reside on your home screen. As you move the icon about the other icons on your home screen will dynamically jiggle around to make space for it.
Moving the icon to the side of the screen will cause the screen to slide over to the adjacent home screen allowing you to position the icon there. Just release your finger to drop the icon in the desired location.
Dropping the icon on the Uninstall Trash Can will un-install the application while dropping it on the App info icon will, predictably, display information about thatApplication.
Moving an icon on the Home screen.
Once an icon is on your home screen you can rearrange the order simply by long-pressing the icon until you feel a vibration, then move the icon to the desired location. To remove the icon drag it to the top of the screen and drop on the Remove icon. This will remove the icon from the screen but not delete the application.
You can also group icons into Folders. This is a very handy way of optimizing your device’s screen real estate so you can easily access all your applications without ending up with cluttered home-screens. To group Applications simply drag one icon on top of another. You will see a blue circle appear, drop the icon and you will see both icons surrounded by the blue circle. Now when you tap the Group a folder will pop up containing the Applications you have grouped into the folder.
In the example below this is what pops up when I tap the ‘Google’ folder on my home screen. All my Google apps in one place and they only take up one icons worth of home-screen space.
Icons grouped into a Folder
Widgets
Widgets are mini-applications that reside on your home screen. Most display some sort of information like the weather or upcoming events in your Calendar. The benefit of displaying this information in a widget is that you don’t have open an application in order to see the information when you can view it on your home screen. Widgets can be positioned according to your preference and some widgets can be configured to display more or less information and occupy different amounts of space accordingly.
Widgets can be classified into three main types or they can be a hybrid of the three.Information Widgets
These are the most common. They typically show a small amount of important information. Tapping on the widget will open up the associated companion application which will allow you to configure what information will be displayed in the widget and will display more detailed information.
A Weather Information Widget.Collection Widgets
These display a collection of information of the same type, generally as a list or a grid view. Collection widgets allow you to scroll through the list and select an item by tapping it. This will launch the companion app for that item. An example of this type of widget is the Gmail widget. You can scroll through your emails and tap on an email to open it up in the Gmail App.
A Gmail Collection Widget.Control Widgets
These allow you to control an application from your home screen without first opening up the App. You can think of these as remote controls. The control widget below allows you to toggle settings for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sync and Brightness without needing to open up the Settings screen and locating these services. A Settings Control Widget.Hybrid Widgets
These contain elements of more than one of the above widgets. A Music App is an example of a Hybrid widget as it shows information about the song being played and it allows you to control the player by allowing you to pause or forward to the next song.A Music Hybrid Widget.Adding Widgets to your Home screens
Adding widgets is done in the same fashion as adding icons to your home screens. Just tap the All Apps icon in the center of your Favorites tray, this opens up the Application screen. You will notice that there are two tabs, one for Applications and one for Widgets. Tap the widgets tab and you will be presented with a grid view of all the widgets available on your device. Swipe right to scroll across to the next page of widgets. Note that beneath each widget is the name of the widget and the number of blocks it takes up on a 4 X 4 grid.
Adding a Widget to a Home Screen.
To add the widget to your home-screen long tap the widget, the device will vibrate and you can drop the widget on the screen of your choice. If there is not enough room you will return to the widget screen and receive a message telling you there is insufficient space for the chosen widget. You will then need to do some housekeeping to make space available.
Dropping a Widget in a Home Screen.
To remove a widget long press it until the device vibrates and then drop it on the X-Remove which will appear at the top of the screen. Some widgets will also allow you to resize them when they are long pressed. You will see a blue outline with blue dots indicating that these are handles that can be dragged to resize.
Like icons widgets can be rearranged and moved across screens. Just long press and drag the widget, icons and other widgets will scatter to make space for you to drop it.Custom Launcher
Although Custom Launchers are not part of the base Android system they are so pervasive that depending on what phone you are using you are probably already using one. Different manufacturers have chosen to differentiate Android by ‘skinning’ Android. HTC has the Sense interface, Samsung has TouchWiz. These are all Custom Launchers which alter the look, the feel, and the way the user interface works.
You can also download some excellent Custom Launchers from the Google Play store. There is no reason to do this other than because you can. The default launcher is excellent. In fact many Android aficionados prefer the stock Google Android launcher to other manufacturer’s launchers which inevitably contain bloatware to punt their products. But no Personalization experience would be complete without installing a few Custom Launchers.
Personalizing your device with various launchers has a downside though. You can end up getting frustrated because you have customized in so many different ways that you have eliminated the carefully crafted Google user experience to the extent that you can’t easily remember how to make a phone call, or read your email. Experience has taught me that if you want your device to work for you, rather than be challenge to operate, then you need to keep things consistent and familiar. Choose a launcher and a layout for your icons and widgets, and stick with it.Keyboard
It might seem strange to have included a chapter devoted to keyboards. But there is a good reason for this. The Android operating system is open and extensible and one of the most creative and functional expressions of the power of open systems is the amazing and innovative keyboards that developers have invented. Apart from touch gestures the keyboard is your device’s most highly used input medium, and on a flat glass screen it is lacking in so many respects. It has no feel, it is cramped and for stubby fingers it is error prone.
Android’s stock keyboard is good and is improving all the time but not as good and as cutting edge as the keyboards available on the Play Store. One would think that a keyboard is a keyboard. Not so. Swype for example is a keyboard that allows you to slide from one key to the next without lifting your finger. Using clever algorithms it ignores the letters in between and is remarkably accurate and fast.Swiftkey has taken word prediction to the next level. As you start typing it suggests words based on what you have just typed. You can either tap the word or hit the space bar to move on to the next word. Speaking of space bars, Swiftkey also allows you to ignore spaces. Just type away with no spaces and it figures out the spaces for you.Swiftkey is also remarkably accurate and fast. And it learns as you type, improving all the time.
Inevitably there will be situations on even the best keyboard app where the auto-correct has made an incorrect prediction. Be sure to re-read before you press send on that important email.Trackback from your site. div > .uk-panel'}" data-uk-grid-margin>
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