First things first: This is not the complete rewrite. That one is still in the works. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, it’s a much bigger task than I anticipated so it’s taking a lot more time to finish it. When it’s ready for testing, you’ll be the first to know :)

Now some rather important news (and I know some people will be thrilled to hear this!). The new Android Market terms and conditions don’t allow developers to sell app upgrades outside the Android Market, so that means LauncherPro Plus will soon be available to buy through the Android Market. Unfortunately that also means the Paypal option will have to be removed, so if you want to buy LauncherPro Plus through Paypal, I suggest you do so in the next few days while it’s still available. If you have bought LPP through Paypal, you’ll be able to continue using it and getting updates as usual.

Now for the main news…

LauncherPro v0.8.4 is now available in the Android Market! (Note: I wanted to get this update finished and released weeks ago, but personal life got in the way and I haven’t been able to finish it until now. Sorry for keeping you waiting!)

Here’s what’s new:

For Plus users only:

  • Facebook login (for the Facebook widget) is now handled through the official Facebook app where available. This should help people with low DPI devices who were having throuble logging in before.
  • Updated the Twitter API backend to fix some issues that some people were having with status updates.
  • New Gmail widget! (Side note: Oh boy, this widget has been giving me lots of trouble to code. Since there’s no officially supported Gmail API in Android, there’s pretty much no documentation whatsoever on it). You can choose the source Gmail account, so you if you have multiple Gmail accounts, you can have a widget for each one of them. My intention was to have the widget simply open conversations in the official Gmail app when you click on them, but unfortunately 3rd party apps are not allowed to open that part of the Gmail app directly, so I had to create my own internal viewer to view them. It’s not as full-featured as the official app but it should be enough for most users. Replying to emails is handled by the official Gmail app (we can launch that part of it from 3rd party apps).

For all users:

  • Gingerbread fixes and improvements. The 3D app drawer has been fixed to work properly on Gingerbread. Other tweaks should provide much improved graphics performance (smoothness) on Gingerbread as well.
  • New homescreen transition effects: “Flip” and “Rotate 2″. The old “Flip” effect is now named “Flip 2″. If anybody can come up with better names for these transitions, I’m open to suggestions :-)

 
Click here to download the APK file.

 
That’s it for now!