Today, I’m actually featuring my own home screen, inspired by the new MIUI ROM for the HTC Thunderbolt and all the home screens you guys have posted over the months — including a bunch of great text-based widgets.
I’ve been loving the home screens you guys have posted, and it inspired me to give mine a bit of an overhaul — and with one of my favourite ROMs — MIUI — finally available for my phone, it was the perfect time. Here are some of the highlights:
- The gorgeous MIUI ROM. To see if it’s available for your device, check their downloads page. Also Google around, since you might be able to find an unofficial port — the Thunderbolt port, for example, is in the late stages of development, so it isn’t on the official site, but you can grab it on the RootzWiki forums.
- The Vexillum Project Icon Theme for MIUI. By default, MIUI only has icons for a few of the default apps, but it just creates a square background for other apps — and it doesn’t look great. This theme brings MIUI-optimised icons for a ton of different apps, and is something every MIUI user should have.
- CalWidget is the calendar widget on the leftmost screen. I’ve set it up to colour-code each event with the same colours I use on Google Calendar (though they could probably use some adjusting for visibility purposes — though for what it’s worth, the JPEG compression is partially to blame for that in the picture above).
- Everyone’s favourite, SiMi Clock Widget for the clock at the top of the home screen. Not much else to say about it.
- Phantom Music Control under the clock widget. I needed the Pro version to use it with the newest version of Google Music.
- Flick Note for my to-do list widget on the rightmost home screen. I’ve synced my Todo.txt file with Simplenote as described here, then set up Flick Note’s “Single Note” widget on my home screen. I’ve customised the look using this method to remove the dark background, so it’s just text on top of my wallpaper (to keep everything looking the same).
- I’m using this lock screen, which comes with MIUI. It’s beautiful.
- Since MIUI doesn’t have an app launcher, I’ve just stuffed all the apps I don’t want to see in a folder called “Crap” on my fifth home screen. The rest of the apps I occasionally use are just spread out on home screens one and five. Having five home screens hasn’t brought down performance at all, and this is one of the smoothest ROMs I’ve ever used.
There’s a lot more customisation to be had in MIUI (definitely check out the Toggles feature for quick access to settings in your notification bar), but that’s about the gist of my home screen. I’ve barely scratched the surface of MIUI’s customisation, so definitely check it out if you’re into customising every corner of your Android phone. Note that while it’s known for looking like iOS, it doesn’t have to — you can use any launcher you want, and there are a ton of other icon themes that are in the more traditional Android style, so don’t let its iOS-like nature deter you.
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