[Nova Launcher] kevin@TeslaCoil:
It's possible this will change. Right now Nova is taking your screen width, dividing by the number of columns, then using the max of the result or 80dp, (default cell width, comes to 160px on the Galaxy Nexus). So with 4 columns on the GN:

360dp/4 = 90dp, so it uses 80dp, then 360dp - 4*80dp = 40dp (80px) left for padding, or 20dp on the left and 20dp on the right.

But 360dp/5 = 72dp, so with 5 columns there's no left over space for padding.

Depending on demand, behavior on other devices, and tablets, it's possible the padding would be user-settable in the future and the cell width always to fill the remaining space after padding.

Theming the icons in the app drawer will likely come, but I'm not sure if it could support ADW Icon Packs for it or not yet.

Customizing the number of homescreens and an option for infinite scrolling is planned.

Got it. Will be fixed in the next update.

Yes, it does appear in landscape (not a bug) and I did actually get it to temporarily appear once in portrait. I'll be adding options to show/hide the search bar and include an option for landscape in that as well. Also will look into the temporarily appearing issue.

It's something I'll be looking into.

Interesting use case, but it's a bit complicated (many parts of the code assume the same grid size across pages) and probably not a popular feature so most likely I won't be implementing it. You might want to check out Launch-X though which gives you a widget with a custom grid of apps, might be able to get your desired setup with it. https://market.android.com/details?id=net.yuvalsharon.android.launchx.free

Yes. It's still a system app, just with an update installed, permissions are retained.

Something I'm looking into.

Yeah, this might end up being a casualty. It's gone for two reasons:

1) It can vibrates when swiping the dock if the starting position was on the app drawer (quite likely with it in the center as most users probably put it).

2) There's some conflict that caused it to stop working when the app drawer became a shortcut rather than a fixed in place view.

2 is solvable but 1 really isn't. If it came back, it'd be optional. Not planned at this time unless lots of people complain.

Infinite scrolling was actually planned for beta2 but I couldn't get it to work so I did the tilt effect instead and figured it could wait a while longer :P. Still planned for a future beta.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do this or not. I need to think about the ui and ux a bit more.

That message appears if no icon pack is installed. For example I've used this one to test against: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gfxandroid.honeycomb

I don't know what you mean by "HW accel using hack" but if that's part of your rom you'd have to ask the rom dev. Nova is hardware accelerated without any hacks.

For testing first-run and update code I end up uninstalling/reinstalling all the time. I definitely feel your pain. Beta2 actually laid some groundwork for backup/restore and I already have the code to do it for WidgetLocker, so Nova will get it soon.

Glad you're enjoying it. The plan is to be very customizable, but with a default feel very close to stock ICS. Similar to how ADW and Launcher Pro have a 2.x feel but can be customized beyond that if desired.