Big Lou
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I've seen this app referenced several times on this forum but I noticed there is not a dedicated thread.
I switched to CM6.0 recently and with it came the Froyo car dock. This dock is MUCH better than Eclair and previous car docks, but I noticed that there were unused buttons--very awkward. In my search to find out how to customize these, I stumbled upon a car dock replacement: Car Dock V2.
The app itself is free and can completely replace the car home just as ADW would replace the home screen. It allows you to add and customize 5 pages with an enlarged grid. Instead of a 4x4 grid on the normal home, you get a 2x3 grid which allows for much larger buttons--perfect for the car!
On this 2x3 grid, you can add applications, shortcuts or even widgets (though widgets need to be 1x1 in size. My favorite part is the ability to completely customize the visuals of the app; the background, button background, and button icons are all customizable. Here is an example of my customized home screen:
The truth is, you are probably going to want to customize your button graphics. They look terrible without high-res replacements as the Car Dock simply enlarges the icons. Because of this, they look heavily pixelated.
There are a few other features that are noteworthy. For instance, as seen in the screenshot above, I have added the title to the graphic itself. For this reason, I deselected the labels for the buttons. You can easily enable and disable labels from the menu. You can also prevent the screen from timing out, which when paired with the screensaver, is nice and convenient. Speaking of the screensaver, you can add nearly any widget that will display on a black background after about 30 seconds. Personally, I use the full Beautiful Widgets Home widget--a nice chunk of information when I'm not using navigation or anything.
It's pretty basic, but that's what you want while you're driving around. It is certainly more feature rich than the stock option. And for free, how can you go wrong?
I switched to CM6.0 recently and with it came the Froyo car dock. This dock is MUCH better than Eclair and previous car docks, but I noticed that there were unused buttons--very awkward. In my search to find out how to customize these, I stumbled upon a car dock replacement: Car Dock V2.
The app itself is free and can completely replace the car home just as ADW would replace the home screen. It allows you to add and customize 5 pages with an enlarged grid. Instead of a 4x4 grid on the normal home, you get a 2x3 grid which allows for much larger buttons--perfect for the car!
On this 2x3 grid, you can add applications, shortcuts or even widgets (though widgets need to be 1x1 in size. My favorite part is the ability to completely customize the visuals of the app; the background, button background, and button icons are all customizable. Here is an example of my customized home screen:
The truth is, you are probably going to want to customize your button graphics. They look terrible without high-res replacements as the Car Dock simply enlarges the icons. Because of this, they look heavily pixelated.
There are a few other features that are noteworthy. For instance, as seen in the screenshot above, I have added the title to the graphic itself. For this reason, I deselected the labels for the buttons. You can easily enable and disable labels from the menu. You can also prevent the screen from timing out, which when paired with the screensaver, is nice and convenient. Speaking of the screensaver, you can add nearly any widget that will display on a black background after about 30 seconds. Personally, I use the full Beautiful Widgets Home widget--a nice chunk of information when I'm not using navigation or anything.
It's pretty basic, but that's what you want while you're driving around. It is certainly more feature rich than the stock option. And for free, how can you go wrong?
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