Cyanogenmod 6 Custom ROM Eval: Part 4, Cents for Sense-ability

I thought I'd do one final post in this series, focused on apps that bring some of the things I liked in the Sense UI to CyanogenMod 6. There are plenty of widgets and apps available that can add Sense-like features or design elements to any Android phone/OS. Unfortunately, most of them that I've found you have to pay for. Here's the list of what I've installed. Most of these have free trials, so you can decide if they're worth the $$ or not.

Beautiful Widgets

PowerAMP's lock screen

SwiftKey

• Beautiful Widgets: adds nicer-looking clock and weather widgets, along with a number of toggle switches for wi-fi, bluetooth, etc. (most of which are unnecessary for CM6, thanks to its great notifications panel). The package, which comes with a number of options, sizes, layouts and skins is $2. Though I like these, none of the Beautiful Widgets (or skins) I tried were quite as attractive as the Sense clock/weather widget. But they are a nice improvement over the look of the built-in clock and weather widgets.
  
• PowerAMP music player: this player has a lot of features, most of which I haven't tried. It looks great too. The thing that sold me on it, though: info and album art showing up on the lock screen, which is a nice improvement over the stock player's buttons-only approach. $4.99
  
• LauncherPro Plus: replaces the ADW launcher that comes with CM6, and allows you to set the number of homescreens, add apps to the ribbon at the bottom, and more. The paid version (which I haven't tried) comes with a Sense bookmarks-like widget and a lot of others. $2.99
  
• SwiftKey Keyboard: I was using this even before CM6. It's one of the best Android keyboards I've used, and it gives you shortcuts to commonly-used words at the top to reduce the amount of pecking required. The keyboard looks great, has a nice layout, and learns what words you commonly use first from your text messages and then as you go, and is therefore much more likely to pick shortcuts you'll actually use. $1.99

One last note before wrapping this up: CyanogenMod 7 (based on Android 2.3 aka Gingerbread) is coming! Nightly builds of the ROM are now available, though I haven't tried any yet...