Comment by ssl-3

20 days ago

Thanks for the tip.

I opened up my phone to see about giving Octopi a shot, and (amusingly? alarmingly?) Nova Launcher produced a popup warning me that it would now feature ads.

Anyway, my launcher needs are pretty minimal. Switching over and recreating a familiar layout was easy enough.

I do find one function missing, though: Some shortcut functionality seems missing in Octopi that was present in Nova.

For instance: Shazam. I use it to identify the music I hear, and that's all I want it for. With Nova, I was able to create a single-tap button on the home screen for a "Shazam Now" shortcut that immediately went straight to the identification phase with zero nonsense. This worked slick, and I'd been using it this way for a decade or so.

With Octopi, I can long-press the Shazam icon and pick "Shazam Now", and that does work. But that's multiple steps instead of just one, and I can't drag that shortcut to the home screen. There is also a list of apps with shortcuts that I can add, but Shazam is missing from that list.

Thus, the single-tap Shazam Now function I'm familiar with is presently lacking. Perhaps some day. :)

(Otherwise, Octopi fits with everything else I want to do, so I'm buying the dev a coffee.)

7 comments

ssl-3

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BoppreH  19 days ago

I managed to add a Shazam Now button using a Shazam widget, not a shortcut. Give it a try!

I just installed Octopi on this thread's recommendation. Pretty good so far, and I'm happy to remove the useless Google search bar from the bottom of my Pixel (I use Kagi and Firefox, neither of which can be configured on that bar). Also satisfied how you can resize widgets to any size, regardless of what the widget asks for.

  • ssl-3  19 days ago

    That's similar functionality, but it's not a Shazam Now shortcut. I really don't want any widgets -- at all, ever. And I need labels -- remembering arbitrary iconography is a silly task when phonetic written language exists.

    Just a shortcut is fine. Or at least: It had been fine for nearly a decade.

    This, right here: This is what I want, and what I was using with Nova Launcher until late last night. https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/01/27/shazam-gets-updated...

    :)

    (Besides, Shazam is just a singular example. I had other shortcuts that I also used. I'm really rather disinterested in finding individual workarounds for each of them.)

    • ssl-3  19 days ago

      As an unfortunate reply to myself, I'd like to ask a question to nobody in particular: Do y'all not use shortcuts? I think that they are pretty neat, and we've had them on Android since around version 7.1.

      And the reason I ask this is because when I Google up different combinations of nouns, verbs and word usements for my problem of Android shortcuts and Octipi Launcher, I fairly-consistently find my own recent comments on HN (above, in these threads; within the bounds of this posting) in the top 5 results.

      And that tells me that I am not only preaching to the choir, but the choir only exists of one member. And that member is me.

      So I guess I am thus preaching to myself.

      Awesome!

      And thus, perhaps I am much more of an outlier than I ever imagined.

      So the question stands: Am I really looking in from the outside with my quest for Android shortcuts that we've had for almost a decade? Is this lack of functionality really a thing that others just simply don't notice in a modern Android ecosphere? Is it a forgotten relic of the past?

      (Whatever the case, it presently doesn't work with Octopi Launcher -- and I'm going to keep using it anyway.)

      2 replies →

pepa65  19 days ago

I tried with Round Sync to add a button for a certain task to my home screen, and it doesn't work... That is very sad, it used to work on Nova.