CyanogenMod is one of the most popular custom versions of Android out there, also called custom ROMs, and as such the burden of delivering a good experience coupled with new and innovative features constantly falls on their shoulders. While there are plenty of ROMs out there that have more features and try to do more stuff than the CM team does, CyanogenMod usually tries to roll one thing out at a time, getting the feature as close to perfect as possible before moving onto the next. The last big project for the team was undoubtedly the OnePlus One, but they’ve had smaller projects in the works for all CyanogenMod compatible phones in the works as well, and today we’re getting a glimpse of one of these.
Introducing CM Home, CyanogenMod, Inc.’s newest addition to their own home launcher, Trebuchet. If you’ve ever used the Google Experience Launcher (or Google Now Launcher as it’s also called), you’ll know that a quick swipe to the left-most screen will bring up Google Now. This was Google’s answer to the way Apple designs its launcher, with the search being on the left-most home screen, but obviously features considerably richer content than the Apple search pane offers. CyanogenMod is looking to replace this with CM Home since you can already launch Google Now by just swiping up on the home button from everywhere.
CM Home looks to feature completely different content from Google Now, so it’s not meant to replace its functionality throughout the OS, rather augment your home screen experience with a little more information than you might have right now. CM Home has been included in the experimental nightly updates starting this week and can be played with if you update to the latest version for your phone of choice and choose Trebuchet as your home launcher. Within CM Home you’ll find a similar card-style layout to Google Now, only instead of the personal search information Google curates for you CM Home displays other important information like missed calls, unread texts and emails, alarms that are set and so on. Basically persistent notifications and missed notifications can be found here, and possibly other things in the future as the team builds out this service. The question right now is would you even use this service, or does the current combination of widgets and Google Now already satisfy your burning need to know all there is about your phone?
