Launcher Pro, one of the greatest Android homescreen replacements (Sense who?), received an update today with 2 excellent new features: virtual homescreen looping and a Recent Apps dock popup.

The virtual looping feature enables scrolling past the leftmost or rightmost homescreens with a quick bounce-to-the-opposite-end effect. While Fede implemented it this way instead of an endless scroll for technical reasons, I think it's visually a lot better and clearer, as you will still know when you've reached the end and won't feel lost in your own homescreen forest.

Joining SMS, missed calls, and bookmarks, the 2nd feature is a new swipe gesture dock popup called Recent Apps. After you enable it by long pressing the launcher icon (see below), swiping it upwards will bring up a popup with a list of recently used applications. This is not really a groundbreaking feature, as Android already has a Recently Used Apps screen (hold down the Home button to bring it up), but it's a very logical addition that doesn't require holding or waiting. Here's what it looks like:

And here is how I set it up (the first popup is brought up by holding the app launcher icon):

As always, great work, Fede!

Changelog

Full changelog follows:

For all users:

• New “Virtual looping” on homescreens! A ton of people requested loop scrolling on homescreens. The problem is that would be incompatible with Live Wallapers, and it would make most static wallpapers look weird. So instead I decided to use a different approach. When you try to scroll past the last homescreen, LauncherPro will quickly bounce back to the first. Conversely, if you try to scroll before the first screen, it will bounce you forward to the last screen. This effectively gives you loop scrolling (you can scroll indefinitely in any direction) without incompatibility issues or nasty visual side effects. (Enable in Preferences > Homescreen Settings)

For Plus users only:

• New dock popup: Recent Apps. Will show you a list of your most recently used apps/tasks, so that you can quickly switch between then.

• New “Clear cache” option for Twitter and Facebook widgets. In order to reduce disk usage and startup time, you should periodically clear the caches which will remove all stored data (tweets, posts, user photos, etc) from LauncherPro. For the Friends widget, you should clear both caches. (Preferences > LP Widget Settings > Twitter widget/Facebook widget)

Download

[qr]com.fede.launcher[/qr]

Source: Launcher Pro