It’s nice to have plenty of applications in our Android phone, until we realize that these applications clutter up our phone by consuming our limited screen space. These are some tips to organize your screen for optimal productivity.
Using Folders to Organize Your Applications
Most Android phones come with 3 to 5 home screens that may not be enough to place all our application shortcuts, but we can use folders to group your home screen shortcuts into some quick pop-up menus.
This is how to create folders on our home screen—tap and hold your home screen for a few seconds to bring up the “Folders” menu.
Select the “New Folder” option from the menu and you should see an empty folder on your screen.
Tap the folder and hold down the folder header to rename it.
Drag the appropriate applications into the folder.
We use the vacation folder to give us quick access to some handy applications that we use when we are travelling with our Android. Maps, Locations, and Navigation are particularly handy when we want to get some direction on the road and KLM currency converter helps us calculate exchange rates on the fly.
Try out the Folder Organizer
Rather than creating folders and putting applications into these folders, we can use Folder Organizer to group our Android applications shortcuts by labeling them. Each shortcut can have multiple labels so that we can assign one application to multiple groups.
The easiest way to install Folder Organizer is by typing “Folder Organizer” into the search text field in Android Market. There are two versions of Folder organizer, the full version that will cost you some money and the lite version that comes for free. We found that the lite version is robust enough to manage the shortcuts on our home screen.
Once installed, Folder Organizer will label some of our applications with its default label—for example, the Folder Organizer will label Angry Birds with “Games”. We can also associate our applications with our own custom label to group them in a folder. Open up the folder organizer screen from your application screen to start assigning labels to your Android applications.
Tap the Labels icon to open up the label screen.
Tap the plus icon to add a new label.
Give the label a proper name. For example, we create da “social networking” label for our social networking software such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, TweetDeck, etc.
Tap the arrow button to bring up the label menu and tap the Items button to assign a label to your applications.
Choose Apps to assign a label to our applications.
We chose to label Foursquare, Google Reader, Mobile Facebook, TweetDeck, and Yammer as our social networking applications.
This is what our social networking folder looks like.
Although we only have a limited number of home screens on our Android, we do have the ability to create folders to group applications according to their context to give us faster access for any occasion.
Minimizing the Need to Swipe Screens
Although we can configure our Android home screen to have up to seven screens, we like to minimize the need to swipe between screens as much as possible by accessing all of our essential application shortcuts from the main screen. If we have used all the available space on the main screen, we can place application shortcuts in the search button or the menu bar.
Doesn’t the search button bring up the search dialog ? Can I put shortcuts in the search button ? The answer to both is “Yes”, with the help of a nifty application called “Quick Settings” that allows us to access the system settings shortcuts through the search button. The easiest way to install Quick Settings is by searching for it through the Android Market.
Hold down your Android “search” button for a few second to bring up the Quick Settings main screen then tap the “menu” button to bring up the customize menu.
Hold down the “Drag Icon” to re-arrange the system settings item that we want to see in Quick Setting’s main screen.
The second place to put shortcuts is the Menu bar using an application called the Smart Bar.
Smart Bar places some useful utilities on your menu bar for quick access. You should see the Smart Bar from your Android application screen once you have installed it through the market.
Tap the Smart Bar icon from the application screen to begin using the Smart Bar features.
Tap the “SmartBar Settings” menu to customize the Smart Bar’s utilities that we want to place on our menu bar. Select the utilities that you want to access from the search button by tapping the check box.
Swipe down the menu bar to access the Smart Bar’s application utilities that we have configured.
“Task Manager” shows us a list of running applications and the memory that they are using. “Application Manager” is a utility to backup, restore, and uninstall applications. “Show Recent Apps” gives us quick access to the most recent 12 applications that we have been using. “End all tasks but current one” frees up our phone’s memory by killing applications that are dormant.
Folders, Quick Settings, and SmartBar are only some of the great tools that give us quick access to application shortcuts on our Android home screen. Of course there are other ways to manage our application short cuts on the home screen. Feel free to share other productivity tips that you use to organize your Android home screen with the other fellow readers in the comments section.[Source]
A lot of mobile applications try to use the visual metaphor of a notepad, but few are able to nail it and strike a balance between usefulness and visual overload. Mobisle Notes is one application that succeeds at this. The interface is pretty yet minimalistic, with a focus on getting in and jotting things down quickly.
Out of Milk combines a shopping list, pantry list and to-do list in one small, intuitive and easy-to-use package. The interface uses a real-life notebook metaphor for lists, allowing you to create multiple lists in each category. An added advantage is the ability to scan bar codes to automatically add items to your list without having to write everything down manually.
This one is purely for the women, and everything about the application shouts that. OvuView is an advanced fertility tracker that helps women track periods, ovulation and fertility. Although the pink and lavender interface clearly states its target audience, the information visualization is worth a look for anyone interested in beautiful UI design.
When it comes to image editing, Adobe reigns supreme, with Photoshop being the king of the hill on the desktop. On the mobile platform as well, the mini version of Photoshop sets itself apart with a nice, simple user interface and a just-right set of features for editing photos on the mobile phone. Take a look at our 
picplz tries to re-create the magic of instagram (an iOS photo sharing phenomenon) on the Android platform. The idea is to click images, apply interesting effects and share them with the world. The picplz application is minimalistic, and acts as a simple client to share snaps on their more full-featured web application.
The official Twitter application for Android is pretty full-featured now, but that doesn’t stop other clients from offering even more. Plume is one such alternative with a beautiful and highly customizable interface. From colorizing your twitter stream to geotagging and inline conversations, it offers a heavy dose of functionality in a sleek design and with another cute blue bird for an icon.
PowerAmp is one of the better known 
Rdio is a newish social music subscription service that allows you to search for and play from a huge collection of music, while also following other users and subscribing to what they are listening to. The minimal interface provides just the right balance of eye-candy and utility, and makes discovering new music easy and fun.
After a dismal few years and a few controversial products, RealNetworks is making a comeback with a kick-ass music application. The application lets you easily organize and play your media collection, including videos (something a lot of other players don’t do very well).
Taking pictures on the android camera is fun, but what’s even more fun is making it look like a camera of the past (and I mean real long past). Retro camera converts the stock camera interface into one of five classic cameras, complete with antique viewfinders and matching photo effects.
With phone screen sizes touching upwards of 4 inches, you don’t need to saw off your fingertips to be able to draw on them anymore (sure, the take on a certain comment from a certain Mr. Jobs is intended). SketchBook Mobile is a miniature, touch-friendly version of the immensely popular Sketchbook Pro application from Autodesk and does a pretty neat job of bringing the sketchbook feel to your Android phone.
Android comes with a built-in sound recorder application, but like with most stock applications, it is quite barebones. Enter SoundCloud, a full-featured sound recording, editing and sharing application which makes it a breeze to record a sound around you and save it in the cloud. It also comes with some rudimentary editing features and built-in social integration.
Listening to a song you just need to have? Got a tune stuck in your head but can’t seem to place it? SoundHound boasts of the world’s fastest music recognition engine that can identify music by simply listening to it. The interface, though minimalistic, makes it easy to search for songs, find lyrics and artist info or even buy the identified song directly from the Amazon music store. 
Okay, last of the audio applications, this time an open source Mozilla project. Songbird is still in Beta, but is already shaping up to be a veritable foe to all the other commercial applications out there. The feature set is robust, the interface unique and usable, and the community support is growing by the day. Watch out for this one in the days to come.
SpeedView is an advanced speedometer application for your Android phone that uses the phone’s GPS to accurately tell your current, maximum, and average speeds, as well as total distance and time traveled. The interface features a cool leather background texture and a car dashboard-like UI.
Sports Track Live is the mobile companion for the SportsTrack web application, which allows you to log your fitness routine on the go. All information gets synced with your account online. The application uses the phone’s GPS to accurately track your outdoor trips and provides instant analytics to help review your progress then and there.
If you are looking for the finest boutique hotels in the world, the search ends at StayHIP. The application lets you browse, evaluate and book at some of the best hotels, all online and through a fittingly sleek interface that has ‘premium’ written all over it.
There are very few India-focused applications on the Android Market, in spite of the huge and growing user base in the country. Taazzago tries to fill that space with a beautiful local news application that provides news, weather, classifieds and deals, all in a compact user interface with surprising accuracy.
Tasker is a multi-purpose automation application for your phone that can automate everything from settings to photos, and SMS to speech. It works by letting you apply actions to triggers, with an overwhelming number of choices for each. The power of the application needs to be seen to be believed, although the interface makes setting tasks pretty simple once you understand the basics.
If paranoia over information security sounds familiar, Wallet is just the tool for you. The application lets you save critical information – like bank details, passwords and important numbers – in an encrypted file on your phone. This file can then be synchronized with Dropbox for anytime access. The interface is minimal but beautifully done with subtle textures and icons.
What sets the Weatherbug application apart from other similar ones is the depth of the information it provides in a small package, as well as the intuitive and clean visual design of the application. Everything from topographic maps to weather conditions and forecasts are available at a tap of an icon, with more details readily available for when you need them.
+Android+Apk+App.jpg)
+Android+Apk+App.jpg)
