Im interested in seeing what small helpful features everyone is finding buried in HC. Im also making sure there isn't any settings I'm not aware of that could be making my experience with HC even better. This may be helpful to many of us who just recently became acquainted to View 4G through numerous internet fire-sales.
I have 2 helpful tips, though they are small. I don't think these are specific to HC, but i think they help.
1. There is a slight screen animation when you exit an app and return to the home screen. It occurs on pretty much every screen change, its like its growing/expanding. Anyway this animation mixed with straining to see the smaller app icon text and smaller widgets of HC may make you nauseous after seeing it over and over again. Just go to Settings/Screen/Animation and set it to no animations. My stock weather widget still does its cool full screen animations, so i don't think i'm missing out on any good animations by changing this setting.
2. For better battery life:
a. use airplane mode.
b. use a wifi widget for quick, convenient on/off toggle. If i mostly keep wifi off my tablet lasts forever for reading, drawing etc.
c. set your screen to timeout after 1 minute or less. Settings/Screen/Timeout
d. set the brightness to low. I keep mine as low as it goes and turn automatic off. Settings/Screen/Brightness
[Q] if you could just tap the wifi icon in the new hc soft status bar to toggle on/off without it taking u all the way to the settings menu that would be amazing- Am i missing something? If its going to hog screen space it should be a super convenient status bar equipped with this feature-
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I have moved on to the Vivid as my daily carry, but still have uses for my Aria. I would like to use it as a full time GPS and media device for the car. Is there a way to remove the SIM card and signal strength status bar icons?
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
duckredbeard said:
I have moved on to the Vivid as my daily carry, but still have uses for my Aria. I would like to use it as a full time GPS and media device for the car. Is there a way to remove the SIM card and signal strength status bar icons?
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not sure why you want to, but you may be able to cook your own (using the UOT Kitchen).
Another option is to hide it from the main screen:
Step 1: Load ADW
Step 2: Open ADW settings
Step 3: Open UI Settings
Step 4: Open Screen Preferences
Step 5: Scroll down to "Advanced settings" and select the option "Hide Status Bar."
This provides the most screen real estate, at least on the home screen.
The other option is to use a custom status bar (from UOT) that is all black or white (or the color of your GPS application). This won't remove it from the screen, but it will at least make it not seen.
One other option is to set the phone into airplane mode. This will remove both the SIM card and signal strength icons, BUT will add an airplane mode icon. This still reduces the number of unwanted icons from 2 to 1 though. ;P
I have found that Sweeter Home has a full screen option. I can then build a fake notification bar (more like a banner) with clock, battery info to provide pertinent info. Come back later for screenshot...
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
Not going to do what I want. Google map and navigator do not run in full screen, so the status bar shows.
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
duckredbeard said:
Not going to do what I want. Google map and navigator do not run in full screen, so the status bar shows.
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
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Click to collapse
Sounds like you may need to live with the status bar...
Status bar is ok...just don't want those loud blaring irrelevant icons warning me of things I no longer intend to use.
You can't know your limits until you exceed them.
Just curious to know if any of you folks are currently working on a way to customize the stock notification widgets inside the drop-down notification window?
This would be awesome as I personally would LOVE the ability to handle volume settings in the widget versus Airplane mode, GPS, and Sync toggles which are virtually useless to me, and I'd imagine a large group of other people.
Obviously, I'm in no way demanding or even expecting, just checking to see if anyone's doing anything with this from the development side.
Many thanks in advance!
-Ryan
Go Launcher offers I customizable widget to control almost anything including what you've mentioned. Granted it's on screen and not on the drop down, but fit the bill for you.
Hi all,
I have several other Android devices at home, all of them runing CM7 or CM9. While I appreciate some of the things the Motorola ROM (GSM here) delivers, I'm missing quite a bit as well:
- grid size on home screen - having 3 widgets fills out completely a screen; I'm looking for a 50% or 100% increase in rows and columns. DPI changer is not able to provide that
- battery reporting is only done in 10% increments; I'm using Circle Battery Widget as a workaround
- no way to toggle 2G/3G with a switch. Using notification toggle because I cannot live without status bar toggles
- provider name is too long in the status bar
- no way to tweak auto light levels
- lock screen does not display any info about missed calls or messages
- notification led does not have any settings
- cannot assign custom shortcuts or wakeups - like pressing both volume buttons to open camera from lock
- no way to change the number of screens in home
- widgets do not get updated after an install, I need to kill the launcher first
- stock gallery looks really sad and performs slowly on zoom
- there is no "charge only" option beneath the usb/mtp/ptp
- no color themes for home screen, so I can use darker colors for power saving
- no themes for email widget, same reason
- email widget uses a lot of power (partial wake) even though the accounts are set to sync once per hour
- I don't see any way to take HDRs with the stock camera app. I thought this was default in ICS
- cannot use any other external sound equalizer - tried mostly with DSPManager
- stock music app does not wake on bluetooth control; if it's paused for more than 30 seconds I need to open it again to be able to resume music
- stock equalizer messes up the volume of the music pretty bad and it compresses the sound
- cannot assign a long press on the back button to kill the current app
On the other hand there are some new custom features which I really like, like the 'disable' application button, smart actions, detailed data usage and data limits, disabling background data, ...
So my question is, how can I enable some of the stuff above without losing a lot of battery life, money or UI integration (I'm thinking metro-like simplistic looks).
I'm also missing the option to disable individual permissions for apps, but the "disable background data" built-in feature fulfills 80% of this. I would have loved to be able to disable location awareness for some apps.
Right now the biggest gripe is the 10% step on battery reporting, I cannot get accurate battery stats. Still, that part is in part filled by BetterBatteryStats.
This might be a bit of a noob question (noob here), but I can't see to find any clear info on this. Is there any point to the Pie controls on the SII? From what I can tell, the main point of using this is to get rid of the customisable hotkeys on other models. If us SII users are stuck with the hotkeys, all that enabling full screen Pie does is loose the status bar, which is a killer I think?
I'm obviously ignoring personal preference here of course - it's a nice enough set of controls which I'm sure some people love, but it seems quite limiting without my status bar (notifications, access to settings, etc)?
DComrie said:
This might be a bit of a noob question (noob here), but I can't see to find any clear info on this. Is there any point to the Pie controls on the SII? From what I can tell, the main point of using this is to get rid of the customisable hotkeys on other models. If us SII users are stuck with the hotkeys, all that enabling full screen Pie does is loose the status bar, which is a killer I think?
I'm obviously ignoring personal preference here of course - it's a nice enough set of controls which I'm sure some people love, but it seems quite limiting without my status bar (notifications, access to settings, etc)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You don't lose your statusbar, at least not on SlimROM
Like DE said, you keep the status bar unless you toggle the option to display the status bar info along the Pie grid.
For S2 it's more of a gimmick than actually useful, for the reasons you stated, we're stuck with hardware keys.
Thanks guys - looks like I'm getting the hang of it, now that I'm playing around with Hybrid properties.
On the S6, when I swipe down from the top of the screen, the giant notification window shows up. This is marginally annoying normally since my home page background is 14% neutral gray, but EXTREMELY annoying at night when I'm reading on the tablet and accidentally cause the notifications to display... My bookreader is a dark-mode setup, and the notifications are blinding white when they display (yes, the screen brightness is about 10-12, but compared to the reader it's blinding)...
I've currently got the tablet in Night mode, which makes the giant notification thing black, so it's not as annoying, but it still keeps getting displayed 'cause of hand position and tablet orientation. And Night mode isn't great for "normal" use so I much prefer something that'll actually help with the notification display.
SO....
Is there a way, even if I have to use a different launcher (I'll need to know which one) to CHANGE the background color of the notification thing (and hopefully the navigation bar background)? I tried Nova Launcher, and it has things that SEEM like they should do something, but they don't change the huge white blob that appears when I swipe down.
Is there a way to CHANGE how notifications get displayed - turn OFF the swipe down from the top of the screen and use something else? If so, how do I set this up? "Do Not Disturb" mode doesn't seem to help.
Is there a way to COMPLETELY turn OFF notifications so swiping does nothing. I can't FIND anything in settings, but I figure I'm missing the "turn off notifications" switch.
I'm also interested in what answers may come. For me it's just about the color; even though I'm dark-themed everywhere using "Swift Installer - Themes & color engine", it doesn't theme the notification panel. Since the theme works everywhere else (even on system apps), this makes me think that 'notifications' is a special case, for some reason.
Curious to hear from others.
Have you tried QuickStar inside of GoodLock app from the Samsung Store? there are lots of mods you can do in there like change the color of the notification pull down.
Thanks. That works pretty well. I can change all the colors on the notification so at least the notification is a black background.
Status bar at the bottom is still bright but that's smaller than the big notification thing. Definitely makes me miss the old Android 6 thing where it just put a couple tiny icons at the top and I had to specifically hit them to see notifications. Never accidentally opened the notifications.
Is there any way to CHANGE the activation for the notifications so they DON'T show up when I don't want them to?