Windows Phone Thoughts: A Whole New Today -- Snoopsoft Dashboard v2 Reviewed

Documentation
An online manual (about 10 pages) is available from the Snoopsoft Web site. It provides a general overview of the main features and functionality of Dashboard and links to more detailed information for developers on how to design and build skins and modules for Dashboard. More extensive user-focused documentation is provided in a Help file (in PIE format) attached to the application.

Games
Yes, Dashboard even comes with a game! It’s called PegMaster and it’s provided as an option on the MyDash view. It’s basically a clone of the ‘Cinqo’ game, where you attempt to guess the colour and order of four pegs after being given responses as to the number of correct coloured pegs and whether they are in the correct position. You get eight guesses on each turn, and there are three levels of difficulty – each adding another colour of peg to the possibles. It took me a couple of minutes to find out how to work this, as there are no instructions provided, and it’s not mentioned in the Help file.


Figure 14: Snoopsoft’s PegMaster game

Conclusions
This is an excellent utility. It’s well written, bug free (as far as I could tell) and provides a lot of functionality which is sadly lacking in the standard version of the Today screen. Snoopsoft has also provided all the documentation and tools necessary to allow others to design new, customized skins for Dashboard. I’m kind of glad Microsoft has taken a hands-off approach to these kinds of enhancements to the O/S, since it leaves room for innovators like Snoopsoft to do some really incredible work.