App Updates : 3.2.0

Hello dear users,

There was another long delay due to different reasons. But the work was continued from time to time and small changes created big features. Now I want to update the app to introduce these features to users.

So the changes include: native widgets, switch to new gray-blue theme, search of icons in all themes and search of an activity among all applications, shortcut on a folder from Document Storage, new help page with the app versions description.  

Native widgets

The app supports adding shortcuts from the Widgets section. But this flow starts only shortcut creation via the old interface, there was no real widget. In addition some launchers don’t support this flow.

Now the app can also create native widgets. This can be added also from Widgets section, but new element differs from the shortcut:

Launcher app is responsible for show shortcuts on the main screen, but widgets are drawn by Shortcut Creator. In addition you can change the widget appearance (together with the icon and the label) after its creation. Some launchers also allow you to add widgets on the fly directly from external apps. So while shortcut creation you can simply add a widget instead of a shortcut. To control this I added a new option on the Settings page: “Add widgets”. 

In the main menu new page has been added for manage already created widgets:

Here you can change the icon and the label of the selected widget and change its appearance. Shortcut Creator does not copy the shortcut appearance for widgets from the launcher by default. There is no way for this and sometimes this is even impossible due to the difference between widgets and shortcuts. Instead of this Shortcut Creator allows you to tweak appearance and even set up different appearances for each widget. You can copy an appearance from one widget and later use it for other widgets. Sometimes it is difficult to set up desired appearance (take into account the launcher limitation and appearance of other elements) therefore Shortcut Creator allows you to set up appearance directly on the main screen of the launcher. 

Widgets pros:

  • The launcher and the system could not affect the shortcut icon and label (like create a special background or add some badges).
  • Ability to change the icon and label after shortcut creation. 
  • Ability to set up the appearance for each widget and change it later. 

Also widgets have some cons:

  • Each launcher draws shortcuts differently — so you need to set up the default widget appearance at first if you want to have widgets with the similar appearance.
  • Sometimes it is not possible to have the same widget appearance as for shortcuts because widgets can have smaller draw areas. 
  • Widgets could not be organized in a group as shortcuts on the main screen.

New blue-gray theme

There are light and dark themes, but this is general rework of all UI which also affects both themes. Due to many requests bright and poisonous icons and colors have been changed on more calm blue-gray hues. You still have light and dark themes, but in addition to background and text color the theme now also provides a different icon set for the UI. The changes affect the menu, pages for configure shortcuts and also internal file explorer. 

Icon search in all themes

The app supports external launcher themes. In the past you could search icons only in the selected theme. You still can do this, but now it is possible also to search icons in all supported themes. For this you can tap on a new search option on the themes grid page. This option allows you to see the filtered icons from all themes. If you tap on some icon you can see the theme name together with the icon name.

Activity search in the applications.

You can find this option on the application shortcut page. There is a list of all applications on the device and in the past you can use search to filter apps using their names. Now this search checks also activities of the applications and shows a more detailed list with the app and founded activities. During the search you can use an additional option to switch to the old search flow (filter only app names). 

Shortcut on a folder from Document Storage

In the new Android versions third party apps have less and less permissions for direct access to file system. At the end an app can use only its scoped storage (this will happen on Android 11) and apps could not use file paths for interaction with other apps. Alternatively an app can use content uri or uri from the document storage. In this case the viewer/editor doesn’t need any permissions and can freely work with the provided content. 

Shortcut Creator could create shortcuts on a folder from document storage before, but this required creation of a separate composite folder which included the included folder from document storage. In general, it was long and not convenient. Now there is a new option on the file shortcut page - you can open the document storage and select a folder. Then you can simply configure the shortcut of the folder and this is all. There are two options with “Document Storage” name, but they differ in sub-title. 

New help page with the app versions description

The page the users can see at the first start of the app and also after each app update. Also you can open it via tap on Help option on page with how-to video list. 

New help page contains small help about the app and also a list with app versions. You can tap on a version and read the version release notes.


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