Even Simpler Smartphone Setup
It’s been a month since I wrote Zen Smartphone Setup. It’s time for a change because the previous Zen setup is no longer zen. It has introduced Widgets. Widgets? On a Zen Smartphone setup not at all. I was facing some issues with the Time Reminder feature as well. So, it was time for a change.
Get OLauncher
Go to play store and install OLauncher. Once you open it, set it as the default App Launcher and you are good to go. You might want to set a wallpaper after this.
The core ideas for a zen setup remains the same. In fact, with OLauncher we get a single screen instead of two!
- Swipe Right -> Phone
- Swipe Left -> Camera
- Swipe Up -> App tray
- Swipe Down -> notifications
Some features
- Add favorites to the home screen
- Rename apps
- When searching in the App tray, if there’s only a single matching result, it’ll launch that app automatically
- You can, if you want, get a Daily new wallpaper
- You can customize the apps that opens on left and right gestures
Core Ideas
Core ideas for a zen smartphone setup:
- no icons for apps (meaning no simulation from seeing a lot of colors and no chance of tempation by seeing the app icon). You can go one step further from this and get a b&w screen filter to completely “turn off” colors but that’d be depressing for normal people.
- limited scope of movement, i.e., having just two screens. I think “ideally” a single screen should be enough but for usability, two is good.
- easy access to search the apps. A single linear list, instead of a grid and searching with your eyes, swipe right -> search the app -> tap and you’re there. It might need some getting used to but directly searching the app is still way better than looking through a list.
- minimal notifications (only keep them for apps that you allow to ask for immediate attention)