Action Launcher is one of Ausdroid’s favourite apps and it’s a huge plus that its developer, Chris Lacy is Australian. Chris has announced today, via his Google+ page, that he’s releasing a beta of Action Launcher 2.0 to the Play Store for members of Action Launcher’s Google+ community.
Action Launcher 2.0 brings a couple of neat new features designed to help with multitasking on your Android device. Firstly, is Quickpage – a navigation drawer that slides in from the right-hand side of the screen, which acts kind of like an additional homescreen, but one that you can instantly access, which makes it perfect for Action Launcher’s new Recent Apps widget.
The second feature, which works in tandem with Quickpage is 1-Swipe. 1-Swipe makes both Action Launcher’s original slide-out application tray as well as the new Quickpage accessible from anywhere on your device with a swipe-in gesture – swipe from the left edge of your device and you’ll get the application tray, slide from the right to open up Quickpage. If you run a custom ROM with the ability to remap your hardware or soft navigation keys, you can map your multitasking button to open Quickpage if that works for you too.
Here’s a video of the new features in action –
For what it’s worth, Chris claims that 1-Swipe and Quickpage have changed the way he uses his phone and are much easier and faster than Android’s standard multi-tasking window. Your use may vary, but if you want to test out Action Launcher 2.0’s new features, just join the Google+ Community and sign up for the beta.
