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


Today, I’m flashin’...
Well, this is a first (at least for me). Imagine, being able to review a product before it gets on the market! :D When I first saw the write-up on this product, I kind of hemmed and hawed “..another Today screen plug-in/update”. But I have to admit that I’ve been very impressed by the look and feel of Flashdash's interface, and the amount of functionality Gigabyte Solutions has been able to incorporate without making it feel clumsy.

Basically, the concept is to bring much more of the system information up to the front of the Pocket PC, rather than having it buried within layers upon layers of sub-folders. And... to do this on professionally-designed themes which include animations in the background. Gigabyte Solutions accomplishes this by completely replacing the standard Today screen with a whole new, multi-tabbed interface.


Figure 1: The TiD animated ‘Floating World’ theme. (A little sampan floats up the river.)

Installation
Installing Flashdash went pretty smoothly for a beta-release program. A self-extracting .exe file was provided for the PC, which uses the ActiveSync installation routines. Take note that there are two parts to the installation, which the routine will handle for you, but might get a bit confusing. During the installation of Flashdash, the routine will check to see if the Macromedia Flash Player ActiveX is present and if not, will proceed to install that first, then return to installing Flashdash. As mentioned above, the memory requirements are fairly extensive (880K for Flash Player ActiveX, and 2.7M for Flashdash itself.), so be careful on smaller Pocket PC’s. Also, this application is definitely not recommended for installation on CF or SD cards.

On my first install, everything seemed to go fine, but when I reset the Pocket PC and it attempted to run Flashdash, I got the error message “Failed to initialize encryption key” and Flashdash wouldn’t run. I contacted Stephen Eddy at Gigabyte Solutions and he knew the answer right away. Apparently, at some time in the past, one of the modules in my O/S got corrupted, and the only solution was to do a hard reset and NOT restore from a backup. Oh well, it was time for a bit of a clean up anyway! :roll: After the reset everything loaded up just fine. I relate this story to you not because of anything wrong with Flashdash, but for information if it happens to you, and to highlight Gigabyte Solutions’ technical knowledge and responsiveness. Well done, Stephen!

After installation, you'll get 14 days in which to play with Flashdash and (hopefully) purchase a registration code. After the 14 day period, if the application is not registered, Flashdash will refuse to display any themes and you will be requested to purchase a copy.

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