Skip to main content

Posts

Applying the System Color Scheme to Your Square Home

As you may already know, Google introduced the Material You theme system in Android 12. One of the most important features of the Material You theme is the dynamic color system, which allows you to personalize the color scheme of the theme to your taste. This can be achieved by selecting the desired color scheme when setting the wallpaper in the system settings, as shown in the figure. Dynamic color system of Android 12 You can find more information about Material You design at the following article. Everything you need to know about Material Design 3 The newly released Square Home (version 3) fully supports Material You's dynamic color system. Once you've selected your preferred color palette in the system settings, here's how to apply it to the user interface of Square Home. 1. Open the Home option. 2. Go to the "Behavior and UI" section. 3. Enable the "Dynamic color theme" option. (Android 12 and above) Before applying the Dynamic color theme After ap
Recent posts

Understanding Tile Background Effects

Square Home currently supports a total of five tile background effects. Go to Home options > Tile sizes and styles > Background effect and select one of the following effects. 1. Disabled This is the default value when you first install the launcher. You can disable the wallpaper or use System wallpaper or App wallpaper to use this effect. If you disable the wallpaper, it uses a black background color, which you can change in Home options > Behavior and UI > Background color. It looks a bit boring at first, but you can use different tile colors and rounded corners to create a nice screen like this. Background effect disabled When using a wallpaper, you can also customize the tile style color to be translucent so that you can see the wallpaper behind the tiles, as shown in the following picture. Applying translucent tile styles on a wallpaper If you want to apply adaptive tile colors here, please refer to the following post. Adaptive Tile Colors to the Wallpaper 2. Blurred S

Now Supports Foldable Devices!

There's a great news! A new update (v2.2) has been released and it starts supporting foldable devices finally. As you know, the previous versions already support different layouts for different screen orientation. When you set "Screen orientation" to "Same as system", you can layout the tiles differently for the portrait and the landscape mode. Layout transition on screen rotation For a foldable device like Samsung Fold 2, you should have enabled "Tablet mode" that supports horizontal scrolling to use the launcher properly. Yes, it's not good enough though. The new update supports the different screen size, for folded and unfolded, in the same way while "Tablet mode" is off. You can build the layouts differently like the following screenshots. Folded Unfolded Enjoy your foldable device!

Live Tiles

Live tile  is one of the most attractive features of Windows phone. It displays continuously useful information on tiles in real time with charming animations. There are several ways to make tiles "Live" on Square home as well. I'm sure you could make your home awesome by applying the following ways. 1. Displaying notifications on tile When you get a notification from an app, you should expand the notification panel from the status bar to see the content. Now you do not have to pull down the status bar anymore because Square home displays the notification on the app tile that is added into your page. Notifications on tile To activate this feature,  - go to "Live tile" in Home options.  - select "Notifications".  - enable Square home in the notification access. The app icon and notification text are switched continuously on the tile with some cool animation. If the notification contains a picture in its content, it will be displayed as

Some Tips for the Contacts Page

The built-in contacts page is a powerful tool to access quickly to your contacts. Since some basic features like searching items, putting it as a page and quick scrolling work the same way as the app drawer in this post , I'm going to give you several tips for contacts specific features in this post. 1. Long-click call You have this option in Home options > Contacts and it is on in default. Long-click call option When the option is on and edit mode is turned off, you can long-press a contact in the contacts page to call it directly. When you have multiple numbers in a contact, it calls the default number, which can be set in the edit of the contact. Setting default number 2. Managing favorites Do you know that you can set a contact to your favorite and list up those favorites only? To make a favorite contact, just toggle on the star that is on the right side of the name in the edit (take a look at the above screenshot). After you made up your favorite list,

How to Cut/Copy and Paste Tiles

Have you ever used "cut/copy and paste" feature for tiles? If you have never tried that, let me teach you how to do it. As you know already, to make some changes in your layout, you should turn on the edit mode first. You can easily toggle on and off the edit mode in the page manager that is open by pinch-in gesture. Page manager When you toggle on the edit button on the bottom, you can see the "+" tile in your page layout and edit something. 1. Selecting multiple tiles Let's try to long-press a tile on the page. You will get some buttons on the tile like this. To get in the selection mode, press the green multi-select button on the center. As soon as you get into the selection mode, three buttons (Style, Cut and Remove) appears on the top of the screen and you can tap each tile to select or deselect. Selection mode: 3 tiles selected 2. Cutting selected tiles As you saw already, there are three buttons on the top in the selection mode

Some Tips for the App Drawer

In this post, I would like to let you know some tips for the app drawer that you might not have noticed yet. 1. Smart picks As you already know, it picks up your favorites apps to the top automatically when you set "Sort order" to "Smart" in the app drawer options. By the way, have you guessed out that the top apps are picked differently according to some situational factors such as newly installation, current time of day, your location, or whether your headset is plugged or not? Your favorite apps can be different depending on it's day or night, at home or at work, and with your headset or not. The app drawer of Square Home analyses your use cases based on the situation and picks the most proper apps to the top. You can change the number of top picks in the app drawer options. 2. App search To search an app quickly, you click the magnifier icon on the bottom menu bar of the app drawer and select a index letter. By the way, have you ever tried to slid