Aviate - A New Kind of Android Launcher, Beta Preview
Aviate is a new kind of, lets say smart or intelligent Android launcher that rearranges your home screen depending on where you are at the moment and the time of the day. Basically what it does is automatically grouping your apps into Collections like work, social, settings, music, going somewhere, news, games etc. and uses these collections in Spaces, combinations of apps and other relevant information appearing on the homescreen depending on your location and time.
For example, once you set the home and office locations, when Aviate detects that your are in your office, the "Office" space is automatically activated, showing you apps from the work collection, "Send Email" and "New Event" buttons to quickly send emails and create new appointments/events on your calendar as well as the upcoming meetings for the day.
There are few other spaces like Home, Night Time, Morning Routine, Going Somewhere and Listening all corresponding to different location / time combinations. You can not create additional spaces nor app collections but you can rearrange and add apps to a collection as you see fit.
Since now we are familiar with the basic terms, lets get a bit deeper into Aviate. There are three main panels, a "Home" panel with your favorite apps and widgets, app collections panel and an alphabetical listing of all your apps.
Now about the Home panel, in the morning, if you are home, it will show you the weather and your meetings for the day. Once you get to the office, it will show the apps from the work collection, meetings and other work related stuff. If you are driving or going somewhere, you get traffic information and shortcuts for navigating to your home or office. When you are listening to music, the "Listening" space shows you information about the artist or band you might be interested in from Wikipedia, Spotify, Twitter and Songkick including recent Tweets, upcoming concerts and bios.
In each space you can add your up to five widgets, just open it and long press over any of the elements and you will see an option to add a widget. You can also add widgets or a photo to the home panel, but same as the space widgets you can only rearrange the widgets from end to end horizontally, You can not have two widgets on the same row.
The hidden slide-out menu shows all the Spaces and nearby locations. You can easily see what is near you, see photos, tips and check in right from Aviate via the built-in Foursquare integration. All in all, perfect execution, quite useful while you are out or traveling, but it would be even better if there was a location filter by type of place like food, bars, hotels...
One thing worth mentioning is how smooth everything runs, even on older device like the Galaxy S3, swiping left, right, up and down with your thumb. The whole look and feel is amazing and quite different from what is usually found on other popular launchers. Talking about looks and personalization options, Aviate is quite conservative offering two themes, light and dark, both with the same flat design, but you can customize it further by installing additional icon packs. If you are looking for ideas on which icons to use for styling Aviate, check out our Best Android Icons selection.
Although currently it is available as an invite only beta, Aviate is definitely worth trying out. Just download it, and request an invite inside the app. If you do not wish to wait, drop us a line in the comments below to and ask for an invite, we have a few left.
For example, once you set the home and office locations, when Aviate detects that your are in your office, the "Office" space is automatically activated, showing you apps from the work collection, "Send Email" and "New Event" buttons to quickly send emails and create new appointments/events on your calendar as well as the upcoming meetings for the day.
There are few other spaces like Home, Night Time, Morning Routine, Going Somewhere and Listening all corresponding to different location / time combinations. You can not create additional spaces nor app collections but you can rearrange and add apps to a collection as you see fit.
Since now we are familiar with the basic terms, lets get a bit deeper into Aviate. There are three main panels, a "Home" panel with your favorite apps and widgets, app collections panel and an alphabetical listing of all your apps.
Now about the Home panel, in the morning, if you are home, it will show you the weather and your meetings for the day. Once you get to the office, it will show the apps from the work collection, meetings and other work related stuff. If you are driving or going somewhere, you get traffic information and shortcuts for navigating to your home or office. When you are listening to music, the "Listening" space shows you information about the artist or band you might be interested in from Wikipedia, Spotify, Twitter and Songkick including recent Tweets, upcoming concerts and bios.
In each space you can add your up to five widgets, just open it and long press over any of the elements and you will see an option to add a widget. You can also add widgets or a photo to the home panel, but same as the space widgets you can only rearrange the widgets from end to end horizontally, You can not have two widgets on the same row.
The hidden slide-out menu shows all the Spaces and nearby locations. You can easily see what is near you, see photos, tips and check in right from Aviate via the built-in Foursquare integration. All in all, perfect execution, quite useful while you are out or traveling, but it would be even better if there was a location filter by type of place like food, bars, hotels...
One thing worth mentioning is how smooth everything runs, even on older device like the Galaxy S3, swiping left, right, up and down with your thumb. The whole look and feel is amazing and quite different from what is usually found on other popular launchers. Talking about looks and personalization options, Aviate is quite conservative offering two themes, light and dark, both with the same flat design, but you can customize it further by installing additional icon packs. If you are looking for ideas on which icons to use for styling Aviate, check out our Best Android Icons selection.
Final thoughts
Aviate is a great launcher that simplifies your home screen and with it the whole process of using your phone. You get to your apps faster, access your information quicker and spend less time browsing through the menus looking for apps. We liked the clean UI, the concept of spaces triggered by location changing through the day, the built-in support for unread messages, missed calls, emails and other notifications. We liked it and we liked it a lot.Although currently it is available as an invite only beta, Aviate is definitely worth trying out. Just download it, and request an invite inside the app. If you do not wish to wait, drop us a line in the comments below to and ask for an invite, we have a few left.