OLauncher and decorating imaginary places

Sometimes when I'm sat in front of a computer I'll find myself moving the mouse cursor around in patterns, as a kind of fidgeting. It's not to navigate through anything or interact with an application, I'm just zoned out and I'm moving something to see it move. 

Sometimes when I'm using a terminal-based application I'm struck by the lack of mouse functionality. It's just me and the keyboard. If I press a key I'm doing something towards some end; if I don't, I'm just considering what to do next. In this case the tool doesn't have an aimless fidgeting option.

I'm not saying that terminal apps are therefore better, but there is something to this idea. User interfaces are often doing two things at once:

1. Acting as a tool, in service of some task. 

2. Creating a digital space that feels like a place we can move around in. 

The desktop on a PC or the home screen on a smart phone are doing 2 as well as 1. They are creating a place where it feels like your stuff is layed out. Both offer plenty of customisation, to make that place feel like your own, to get it just right, with the right background image, the right icons, the favourite apps. To many users, it becomes a mode of expression, "Do you like what I've done with the place?"

When decorating or laying out a digital space, it can be good to think about why we do this. I think it's similar to decorating our homes - this is a place where we spend time, and we want it to be comfortable and to reflect something about ourselves. 

With smart phones, because I use mine more than I'm happy with, I ask myself why begin from this assumption that the home screen is a place that I spend significant time. When I unlock my phone I want it to be because I want to communicate, to create, to find something. I am trying to reduce the times that I pick it up, unlock it, and then allow myself to be led by what I see there, to go through some content on autopilot, responding to UI elements designed to lead me onwards. 

OLauncher is an app created by @tanujnotes

It replaces the default app launcher on Android so that your home screen can be a simple two-colour list of app names. My home screen has a black background and shows the date, remaining battery, and 5 app names in white text. I can swipe up to get a searchable list of all the other apps.

There's very little affordance for play, fidgeting, moving the decorations around. It makes the app launcher into a tool, for launching apps. I really like it. I've been using it for about half a year and I have no desire to go back to a standard launcher. It is a small but impactful way to take back some of my control over what is essentially an addictive device that I tinker with for literal hours everyday. 

I've tried various apps to take back this kind of control. I recently wrote about one sec:

My experiment with that has ended. But OLauncher is well proven now, for me. 

I recommend it to anyone who wants to make their Android phone more of a tool and less of a fidget box.