Someone asked how Nothing Phone UI looks. Worth sharing as a post.
Hi, where else can I upload this image to illustrate what I mean?
This is UI on my nothing phone. I see a major benefit for my everyday mental wellbeing to not have my phone shooting at me with all colors, and instead being "just a good interface".
There might be some issues with icon recognition and speed of access, but since that's your device and your icon placement, you eventually getting used to it. In exchange you receive a clean UI which doesn't overload your receptors, which is a very important thing for the device you look at often.
Weather widget in the middle often shows calendar events, but I don't discolse that for privacy.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
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Looks like Nothing.
Fine, Dad, take my upvote.
And my Axe!
Let's have an obscure reference fight!
Good fight, good night!
before the crūtager vikings commit atrocities
In the same vein, I use Niagara launcher and a monochrome theme - I find it helps with the phone addiction.
Edit: This is just one tool, you also have to really want it to break habits.
Yeah, the same principle. And they UI also done as some custom application you install.
Phone didn't come with it installed by default, maybe it is now.
While I've heard mostly good stuff about Nothing, I noticed an interesting tidbit about early investors on Wikipedia:
Steve Huffman of Reddit fame, as a Lemmy denizen I'd say not ideal to be pouring more money in his pockets lol
I only can say... Fuck spez
Sorry this is the only thing I can think of when looking at those icons
Nothing to see here, folks...
I do something similar on my phones. The screen turns on to a blank page with just the time and alarm/media playback information.
::: spoiler Home :::
To access my applications I swipe left. I've made the icons monochrome and removed their names so I rely on search to find and open the app I want. This makes app launching less of an addictive reflex and more of a conscious decision each time.
::: spoiler App Drawer :::
Yeah, the same principle.
What's that Clock widget and what icon pack areyou using here? That's not Articons is it?
It's the Orbit clock in the Kvaesitso launcher (one of the stock options). And yes, the icon pack is Arcticons, although I also use Alembicons to create icons for apps that aren't currently supported by Arcticons.
Ah, no wonder the clock looks familiar. I've use Kvaesitso before. Thanks.
You can do the same monochromatic thing with nova launcher and whicons
Awesome! I am glad I have your comment in my history. If I ever change phone to another android, I will come back to it, so I know how to swap to monochrome :3
Look it doesn't look as good as your UI, but it's as close as I could get to the monochrome look that I wanted, The widgets still have full colour:
That looks neat, what is the launcher name?
It's nova launcher, paid, but worth it. Also has the nice side effect that when you move to a different phone tour UI remains the same
Is there a way to bring back colorful icons without changing the launcher ? The phones and the launcher look solid but these icons make it pretty dull
There's a setting for it yeah
Yeah, IIRC you can choose between monochrome and colorful options, but it immediately loses that touch and looks like any other Android phone, which is not a bad thing, Android has a good design overall.
Why two clocks and weather-widgets?
Why two clocks and weather-widgets?
BankID spotted!
Jo. Proprietary foundation of Swedish society.
I've been using T-UI for probably 8+ years now. It hasn't been updated in ages, but it really doesn't need to be.
I've even built it out by creating a tui folder with empty files in it. Tasker has tasks set to execute when the files are modified, and T-UI has aliases set to touch specific files if commands are entered.
looks very clean
Thanks! It is. Maybe their launcher is just available for all Android phones. Or there are other monochrome launchers.
Why two clocks and weather-widgets?
Why three comments? 😜
I got a CloudFlare page telling me I was blocked.
Middle widget is mostly calendar events, but because my calendar is now free it swapped to weather by its own.
It works well though, because I don't know where my eyes will land when I start looking at the screen. Sometimes it is the top of the screen, sometimes middle, both will outcomes will tell me about the weather, which is the only reason I look at the screen, honestly.
3 different data mining parent companies
I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.
does the phone come with bloatware?
No, it's almost empty.The only bloatware I had in the first version was YouTube application, which I don't use. And they have app to play with glyphs, but not installed by default either.At least it was like that oj the first version.
Pretty light on bloatware. I broke my Nothing 2A's screen a couple months ago (it got ran over by a Camry) and I still miss it... I mean I still have it, and it still works but finding a cheap screen for it in the US is difficult
if one may pry further, what has been the most obvious of the bloatware on the device? how irritating has it been?
context: i'm tapping this comment out on a samsung device that has a whole shadow suite of bloatware apps which simply can't be disabled on stock. i am considering a switch but don't want to end up swapping a frying pan for the fire.
Oh fuck no... Samsung taught me to hate bloatware. Nothing is not even in the same league. The 2a came with an app to integrate other Nothing devices and an AI wallpaper generator. It also came with some software to integrate with the glyph interface that I actually liked.
Just an FYI, a lot of phones can now be debloated using Shizuku and Canta. Just search the right process for your phone
As a first time Samsung user (with OneUI 7. So I never had experience when they were very bad from what I heard), I like a few of their apps more than Google's or other options tbh. Their Notes app is basically needed for handwriting notes using the stylus. I like their Calendar app more than Google's, and it's a toss between Fossify Calendar. Their Clock app is kind of amazing that I can make alarm groups that I can set to turn on or off based on a few conditions.
Bixby and AI stuff though can fuck off. Turned it off immediately.
How is notification center and phone?
Is it the one you see when you slide down?
That one is still bombarded by notifications from applications, so I simply have "Do Not Disturb" mode on almost all the time.
It also allows to disable notification by holding it, but it is like that on all phones, I assume.
It has support for silent notifications also, but I kinda just nuke whatever new thing pop ups there.
And also it has customizable buttons for features with the ability to change size and placement. Quite neat.
You should be able to long press unwanted notifications and stop the system showing that class of notification or all notifications from some app
"Turn off" stops that class of notification from that app
Settings gear takes you to the notification section of the app that threw the notification and toggle any or all of that apps notifications
You can also get to the notification a couple of other ways:
Yeah, exactly how it works.
Nice! I have Bern struggleing to get a clean UI. But my notification area is always cluttered 😅
And it's like constantly 50 notifications you never asked for stacked in the endless columns of meaningless information, regardless how often you disable them :D
But I simply nuke whatever pop ups. Keep sms, and emails.
I also thought that's standard, but that UI also allows to customize and disable them per category when you hold your finger on the notification. So I can disable everything, but keep direct messages, for example.
If you'd like to have a bit more control than just either turning on/off/hide classes of notifications as provided by Android, I recommend getting Buzzkill. There's a few other apps that does this but I don't remember their names.
But basically the gist is that you can set rules for notifications by app basis, if-then arguments and a few other methods I didn't touch on to control how notifications show. Batch them together every few hours. Block them from showing during certain time periods and/or days. Mute notifications for a few minutes when that one guy in the group chat that likes to send 1 sentence in 100 lines.
I'm not sure if Buzzkill is open source or not; I can't recall if I ever checked it.
As far as I can tell they're stock from Android
https://youtu.be/xKLKl3H9rro
Nah, this is just a random complaining video for the sake of complaining.
Complaining about the default button size for the panel where you can change button size is just making an unnecessary noise. It is intentionally done like that to force you to change their size so phone becomes yours.
If something is using dots motif, it doesn't mean everything else should automatically use dots, it would look be silly. Different locations on the phone use different visual style, that's okay.
Then it goes into glyph selection and missing actual glyph selection setting.
I just want a feature phone that can act as a wifi hotspot for my laptop.
Isn't it standard on all phones?
That's what I was gonna say. Like my pre iPhone smart phone had bluetooth and wired hotspot.
feature phone. slangly called a dumbphone. basically I want something that is by and large only a phone but just add ability to get my laptop online with it.
I would like to have a Project Ara without Google buying it up and doing some good PR only for it to disappear forever. Project Ara was presented by Google in 2014 and was a modular smartphone where all components could have been replaced...
Can you use something like the kiss launcher to make it text based and no icons
No idea, that's android, so probably. That view is their official launcher, but my phone came with default android looks.
Why not gesture navigation?
Honestly, that's too hard for me to figure out how to setup without knowing the outcome.
Is it good and worth to dig in?
Yeah and I think it's pretty easy to do so. And easy to go back if you don't like it
Does the phone have a built in battery charge limiter or do you need to root for that? I leave my phone plugged in all day/night running stuff and I really don't need it at 100% 24/7. I think that's the only thing I need root for at this point. Nothing else I want to run needs it anymore after android 13 finally added the ability to toggle airplane mode on and off WITHOUT root.
Yeah, I checked now. Recently learned about this feature from reddit, and just checked it to find that it is activated already on my phone.
It has "smart charge mode" to gradually charge overnight, and "Custom charging mode" to not charge it to 100%. Maybe I should activate it.
Thank god. Whoever decided that "smart battery charging" should only ever be automatic, and can't be hard capped should be quartered. Thank god more companies are finally giving people the option. Especially since it apparently goes all the way down to 70%. This might be what gets me to finally retire this poor phone.