I was being irritated by only having five Home screens last night, so I went searching for a solution. The only ones I seemed to find were Home/Launcher replacements, which I'd tried before and hated. Their UIs were uniformly lousy. But I thought I'd give it another shot.

I don't know if I just didn't try the right ones before, or if the ones available now weren't when I first gave it a shot, but I'm upset that I didn't try these sooner.

After a few hours of playing, I feel like I can heartily recommend either LauncherPro or ADW.Launcher. If they're not both based largely on the default launcher, I would be mightily surprised. They both feel almost exactly like the default with some nice additions.

They share a lot of new features, while seemingly not losing any features of the stock launcher. The new features include support for up to seven screens, change of icon density, customizable home screen "dock" (where the button to get to the full app list is), rotatable home screen, ability to set an icon for virtually any "Intent", uninstallation of applications directly via drag to trashcan, support for scrolling home screen widgets, some UI changes to the all-apps list, etc.

(Why the limit at seven screens, though? Why not allow an arbitrary number?)

There are some differences between them. LauncherPro allows you to have the home screen "dock" be swipeable for multiple sets of launchers there. ADW allows you to pack icons onto the home screen to ridiculous levels. LauncherPro has the ability to create an icon for any Intent, even ones that don't exist, while ADW only provides the ability to launch Intents that are "published" in the API. There are some UI differences in the settings for some of the features. I tend to think that ADW has the upper hand there. ADW is open source, while LauncherPro is not. LauncherPro has an up-pay version with some widgets (which seem nice, but that I largely don't care about).

I decided that I really liked the swipeable dock, so I decided to go with LauncherPro. I think that if ADW adds this feature, I'll switch over, mostly to support the open-source nature. I may, in fact, look into implementing the feature myself. Point being, either ones seems a very good option.

For now, I'm really happy with an additional two screens and a 25% increase in screen app density, from sixteen icons per screen to twenty, which solves the problem I went looking for a solution for. The additional features are (very tasty) icing on the cake.