How to make AOSP look more like Sense on your rooted HTC EVO 4G
This guest article was written by Sam Sarsten.
HTC Sense or AOSP? You be the judge.
To the trained G&E reader's eye, what's shown above is obviously AOSP on my HTC EVO. But the untrained could easily be fooled into thinking that this is Sense, especially with the availability of HTC Skins in Sense 2.0.
So what's the trick? Before I tell you, let me preface the secret to my illusion. I love Sense because of all the widgets and how clean it looks, and I hate Sense because there are too many things running and it kills my battery. Likewise, I love AOSP because everything works and my battery is amazing on Tiamat's SBC kernel. But I hate AOSP because it looks boring.
So I found a happy medium: AOSP and LauncherPro Plus. Find out how you can achieve the same look on your AOSP ROM below.
First, you need the launcher: LauncherPro Plus ($3.49 in the Market).
LauncherPro Plus has many features that any Sense lover will like, including home screen previews. You can also select how many screens you want, which is cool.
There are also scrollable widgets that satisfy your need for FriendStream and that slick Agenda widget from Sense. I'm sure you've noticed that Sense 2.0-esque dock in the screenshots too. LauncherPro allows for custom docks; just Google "sense docks" (but be more specific) and you will find many to choose from.
Once you get everything set up to your liking, all you need to compete the look is that fancy Sense clock widget. Or at least something that looks like it.
In comes Fancy Widget Pro ($1.99 in the Amazon Appstore).
I'm using a different weather skin in the screenshots, but one of the skins you can download perfectly matches the Sense clock and weather. Beautiful Widgets ($2.84 in the Market) also has Sense-looking skins to check out.
The final touch is the LauncherPro Sense skin ($1 in the Market).
This makes all your LauncherPro Plus widgets look exactly like Sense, and there is now even a skin in the Market that looks like Sense 3.0. There's also a Sense skin that comes with the Sense clock widget ($1.41 in the Market), which eliminates the need to get Fancy Widget Pro. FWP was one of Amazon's free daily apps a few weeks ago, though, so you probably already have it anyway.
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And voila! You’re done. You're now running an AOSP ROM that looks a heck of a lot like Sense.
This guest article was written by Sam Sarsten.
