Windows Phone Thoughts: Add some Flash to your (To)Day! -- a review of Flashdash

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Monday, September 13, 2004

Add some Flash to your (To)Day! -- a review of Flashdash

Posted by Don Tolson in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM


Look and Feel
The interface provided by Gigabyte Solutions includes Bluesteel(TM), designed by TRUTH in Design , and co-developed with Gigabyte Solutions. Included with the Flashdash installation are 15 McDeb themes and 5 by TRUTH in Design (TiD). 10 of these themes include animated backgrounds.


Figure 2: The McDeb ‘Sheep’ theme. (The sheep follow each other around on the hill and wait till you see the nighttime version!.)

Just a note to be careful with some of the themes, as they may not work exactly as you would expect. For example, below is the TiD Longitude theme, as it appears on the Today screen of Flashdash.


Figure 3: The TiD Longitude theme (neat watch!)

Unfortunately, the selection of text colour for menus gets into some problems when you tap the Start button, as shown below.


Figure 4: The same theme, after you tap on Start. Note that we’re only getting the icons. Where did the text go?

It’s not a big thing, once you realize that the problem is white text being displayed on a white background. But it was a little unsettling for me initially when all I saw was the icons, and wondered what had happened to all my applications, etc.

Overall, the look and feel of Flashdash is polished and professional. It consists of the main ‘Today’ screen which displays time and PIM stuff (depending upon the theme selected), plus a series of tabs along the bottom to launch programs, view running programs or change the display options on the theme.


Figure 5: Flashdash’s Today tab – expanded version.

There are a number of icons and buttons located within the main Today screen, which provide a number of different features. Rather than try to describe them all, I thought the following pictorial would help.


Figure 6: The icons on the Today screen tab.

As I mentioned before, most of these I guessed right away, since the graphics depicted the effect pretty obviously.

On the Launch tab, Flashdash presents the icons for applications located in the Programs folder of your device’s main memory.


Figure 7:The Launch tab.

I like the size of these selections and the fact that Flashdash has chosen to use the application’s icon, not just a textual description. There is room for 12 selections on each screen, with an arrow to the right to scroll to additional ones.

In the middle, Flash-powered plugins are displayed and can be launched. Here, I’ve just shown the ‘smalltimer’ one included with the demo. There’s more discussion about the plugins a little later in this review. Along the bottom of the screen are icons for the most commonly accessed applications on the Pocket PC. I found the IR beaming one (the red semi-circle with a dot and a beam in the middle) didn’t work for me.

The Running tab provides a list of currently running applications on the Pocket PC, including plug-ins, and gives you the option to stop them.


Figure 8:The Running tab.

I thought this was pretty well done, and a lot easier to find than the Start/Settings/System/Memory/Running Programs version in the O/S.

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