OmniRom squeezes in two more features: Sound Themes and OmniSwitch

More good news for fans of OmniRom – the development team has been busy cramming even more features into their already packed custom ROM. The devs clearly have a busy schedule, just one week ago OmniRom announced news of its awesome looking multi-window feature, and the week before that we saw the ROM’s smart dialler system.

The latest additions to OmniROM include the integration of customizable Sound Themes and a new app management idea called OmniSwitch.

We’ll start with Sound Themes, as it’s a little more obvious what this actually does. Simply put, this new feature allows users to apply sound packs to their device, which will replace the stock sounds for the camera shutter, lockscreens, etc.

Unfortunately, the currently Sound Themes implementation isn’t as user friendly as installing a custom icon pack or theme, as it requires users to manually install their desired sounds as a .zip file in the “soundpacks” folder, alongside an XML to map the correct actions to the desired sounds. It’s not overly complicated, but hopefully it won’t be long until there’s a more user-friendly application to do all this for you.

If you’d like to see an example of Sound Themes in action, check out the video below.

Moving on, OmniSwitch is an app switcher with support for a favourite apps list and various application controls. It’s somewhat similar to a cross between Paranoid Android’s PIE and Halo controls, but with some slightly different results.

Just like Halo, OmniSwitch sits at the side of your display and can be opened up with a swipe and drag motion. The overlay contains action buttons to control currently running apps, with functions such as “kill all”, “home”, and “switch to last app”. There’s also a list of recently used apps and below that a horizontal list of your favourite apps, which can be configured to give you quick access to your most commonly used apps.

OmniSwitch can be found in the most recent nightly build of OmniROM. Sound Themes isn’t currently built into the latest nightly, but should be merged into the official build in the near future.