Friday, April 23, 2004
A Whole New Today -- Snoopsoft Dashboard v2 Reviewed
Posted by Don Tolson in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:30 AM
Skins
One of the most powerful features of this product is its ability to incorporate skins, which not only provide backdrop pictures, but also allow the developer to change the overall look and feel of Dashboard. There are a few skin designs available from the Snoopsoft site , and a larger number are available from Juni. There are also Dashboard skins available from www.ceskins.com. Finally, there's a large assortment of skins available at www.wincustomize.com.
After the skins are downloaded to your Pocket PC, selection of which skin to use in Dashboard is made from the Skins tab when you tap the selection (check mark) icon.
Figure 10: Configuring skins in Dashboard.
The Rotate checkbox and associated time selection boxes allow you to specify a group of skins which will change according to the time interval specified. Never will your PDA be boring!
The Launchers
Snoopsoft’s Dashboard comes with two application launchers. The first is the Launcher module, which is accessible from the Launcher view.
Figure 11: Dashboard’s Launcher module.
Here, Dashboard presents all the icons it can find in the Program folder, to allow you to launch them directly. If, as in the case shown here, you have sub-folders holding various types of applications (such as the Games folder I set up), then Dashboard will present a list of these folders and allow you to choose among them.
The other launcher is called the Mini-Launcher, which is a plug-in which you can attach to any of the five views. The idea is to attach your most frequently accessed applications to the Mini-Launcher, so they are available at any time. To add icons to the Mini-Launcher, you must copy the icon (or a shortcut) to the “MiniLauncher” folder in the main Dashboard installation folder on your PDA. On my machine, it was located under Program Files/Snoopsoft/Dashboard.
Customizing the Views
Dashboard provides fairly extensive capabilities for changing the functionality of each of the views. The configuration screens are accessed by tapping the checkmark icon next to the Help screen question mark at the bottom of the screen. The configuration module has tabs for each of the views and for overall Dashboard options.
The General, Font and Skins tabs allow you to make selections about Dashboard in general – from the language used (Dashboard supports English, French, German and Italian) to remaining battery power, the font can be used as a base, and the skin interface.
Figure 12: Configuring languages.
There is also a Quick Launch tab which allows you to change the default applications associated with each of the View icons. Thus, if you are a fan of another PIM than Pocket Outlook (such as Pocket Informant, or Pocket Day), you can have those attached to each of the view buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Figure 13: Configuring Quick Launch
