I have to drop a quick update here to my lukewarm
post on aHome. Three days after I reviewed it, mAPPn released version 1.4.0 of the program, and almost all of my complaints have were addressed.
First and foremost. aHome now has the Cupcake QWERTY, widely available in both portrait and landscape modes - it won't assist you in other apps, but works for all OS and at least some widget text fields. For instance, I can tweet using quicktweet without sliding my screen open. There isn't any haptic or audio feedback, but it's a tantalizing taste of things to come for Android fans. The keyboard now changes your view to typed text is never blocked, but try hitting menu with the soft kb on screen - your options pop up behind the keyboard. Minor bug.
Overall, I'm seeing a major performance boost. And my app menu is black and beautiful. aHome has also taken a huge leap forward in theme support, allowing users to download themes from within the program and save them to an SD card. I downloaded the entire 10 MB "March Collection" last night. That's a great touch - bundling a bunch of skins for mass download.
I still don't like that I have to receive my upgrades via email, as that's supposed to be a solution for customers outside of the US. I'm not sure what's going on with that, and apparently, neither is
mAPPn. Still, the priced Market is new, and there are bound to be a few copy protection issues. I still say aHome is the best Android home replacement. Open Home fans would likely debate my reasoning passionately.
John Walton - Cell phone editor
John Walton is a student and writer who spends most of his free time fingerpicking an acoustic guitar and authoring biographical snippets in the third-person. He lives with his wife and their cat,...
/cheers
DIVA aHome theme
http://www.mappn.com/ahome/theme_dl/screenshot/diva.png