I really enjoy having a great looking home screen with a good balance of colors and very little distraction. But I felt like destroying something beautiful by splashing tons of brightly colored pixels everywhere. The app responsible for this is PowerLine, an on-screen display that uses persistent lines to keep you apprised of almost any live stat you could ever ask for. This comes to us from Urbandroid Team, the developers of Sleep as Android.
This isn't a brand new idea by any means, and battery bars like this reach all the way back to the Windows Mobile days. Plenty of ROMs and apps deliver similar features, but few of them offer quite as much customization or as many stats. Each bar can be individually configured to appear on any edge of the screen, aligned to either corner or centered, and even offset from the edge by several pixels. Further refinement is possible for line thickness, transparency, and up to 3 colors to indicate low, normal, and high usage. Here's the current list of items you can keep an eye on:
- Battery
- Cell signal strength
- WiFi signal strength
- Unread SMS
- Missed calls
- Memory usage (RAM)
- Processor usage
- Internal storage
- External storage
- Clock (yes, just a bar that grows as the day goes by)
- Decoration (a full length bar, ideally it can be used to tint your notification bar)
PowerLine is free in the Play Store, but only allows up to 2 indicators to be active at one time. Even in the free version, all of the options are available. If you're looking to flood your screen with unsightly lines, an unlock key is also available for $1.49. This is a pretty decent option for the person who wants a perpetual view of everything happening on their device, but remember, the gods of Android design may hunt and kill you for each and every pixel you shamelessly cover up.