The Monochromatic Home Screen

Lifehacker reader UnMicD uses a completely black-and-white home screen with a clever method for sorting his apps into folders. Here’s how he set it up.

UnMicD explains the screens:

This is my somewhat-minimalist, white-on-black setup.

It’s on a Samsung Galaxy S Captivate running CyanogenMod 7.1.

1. A simple, stock lockscreen (not pictured). It’s completely black with just the sliders and music controls, when I’m listening.
2. The main home screen has a player widget at the top, an action bar on the bottom with some frequently used shortcuts (as appears on all home screens) and SMS/Gmail/Gtalk shortcuts down the right side for easy thumb-launching.
3. The left home screen has a calendar on the top half and a to-do list on the bottom half.
4. The rightmost home screen has five different words, each of which corresponds to an app group. For example: “Tell” opens a set of messaging and social networking apps. The others are “Show”, which contains media consumption apps (which may be a bit counter-intuitive, but I like the way it fits); “Play”, which contains games; “Make”, which contains creative work apps like Flick Note, My Writing Space, and Thinking Space; and “Believe”, which contains personal goal related stuff, like RunKeeper, JEFIT and Stopwatch.

Here’s how its put together:

• ADWLauncher EX, although the free version is probably sufficient
• Minimalistic Text widgets for the quicklaunch words
• The AndroidPhone7 ADW theme for the dock
• The Minimalist ADW theme for dock icons and centre home screen icons
• SiMi Folder, which provides the actions for the Minimalist Text widgets to quicklaunch
• The Simple Calendar widget
• UberMusic as my music player, which comes stock with the widget used on the centre home screen. I also use the ClearWidgets skin.
• Flick Note, the Simplenote client that I use for my little notes and the to-do list widget