Let’s face it, there are a lot of home screen launchers out there. Something all of these launchers have in common is, you need to decide what apps are on the home screens and what the background image is. When you want to change how you are using a home screen, you need to make the changes manually. Well, until now that is.
When sifting through apps in the Google Play Store recently, I came across a pretty neat home screen launcher. It’s called Everything Home. What Everything Home does is change the icons and look of your home screens based on your search terms. Pretty interesting huh? Let’s take a look at how it works.
Starting out
You will obviously need to download Everything Home from the Google Play Store. Once you download it and open it, you will be asked if you’d like to have it as your main home screen launcher. If you do, set it as your default and move on to the fun. That’s really all the setup you’ll have to endure.
Using Everything Home
You can make adjustments to your home screen like it were any other home screen launcher out there. Add widgets, folders and other items to your home screens. They will be momentarily replaced when you receive your search results.
To get the full value from Everything Home, you need to use the search bar at the top of the screen. In this example, I searched for the generic term “soccer”. As you can see in the screen grab below, the background image and all of the icons are different and geared toward soccer in some way. Pretty cool huh?
Here are some other searches:
New York City
See how the icons changed to shortcuts you might find useful while navigating through NYC?
Cross Country Trip
Take a look at the options you are given here. Would they help you plan a trip across the country?
Eating Healthy
There are some pretty good resources here for eating better in my opinion.
Summer Activities for Kids
If you are asked to babysit and need some ideas for activities, these would surely help.
As you can see, Everything Home can be really useful when using your Android to search for pretty much anything on the web, not just certain things.
When making a search, you might need to better direct Everything Home. Select whether you’d like to have your results reflect Web search, images or other options.
You can also refine your searches if you press the three vertical dots at the top right of the search results. As you know, narrowing your results in Google can be really helpful to get the information you are in search of.
Other stuff
Something else worth mentioning is, apps are placed into categories and folders. This helps make more sense of the mess we call our app drawer.
When the results are shown for your search and the home screen is changed, you will see app suggestions as well.
Final words
While there isn’t a lot to show with Everything Home, it is something you can really have fun trying out. When I first downloaded it, I tried a lot of different searches to see what popped up for shortcuts and what it chose for a background image. I thought there were a lot of really good images and the icons really were helpful and sped up the process when doing some research.
Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.
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