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


Integration with Outlook
On the Today tab, Gigabyte Solution has included applets to mimic the behaviour of the appointment and task functions on the standard Today. It’s not exactly the same however, since they both use a look-ahead parameter defined on the configuration screen to determine how many appointments or tasks are 'active'. Also, the sort order of appointments and tasks is a bit different from that shown in Pocket Outlook and on the standard Today screen. Stephen and I have been talking about ways to handle that, since I make fairly extensive use of tasks and appointments to keep myself on track.

It’s easy to flip between the Standard and Flashdash Today screens though, using the icons in the System Tray at the bottom of the screen. Or, tapping the icons to the left of the entries brings you directly into the Pocket Outlook function.

Plug-Ins
Because of the way Flashdash is designed, Gigabyte Solutions has provided applets for the standard Pocket Outlook Today plug-ins, such as Owner, Date, Tasks, Upcoming appointments, etc. There is no support for third party plug ins such as Pocket Music 3 or pTravelAlarm. Gigabyte Solutions does provide an interface for developers to build plug-ins, and an example called SmallTimer was provided in the version I reviewed. SmallTimer simply displayed a single line digital stopwatch function on the Flashdash screen. Unfortunately, the only way to get rid of it was to go to the Running tab and shut it off from there.

Configuration
There are two ways to configure Flashdash. First, is in the configuration of the theme itself, which you access by tapping the Options tab at the bottom of the Today screen.


Figure 9: Flashdash’s Options tab.

Here, you can adjust the background or text colours, change the size of text used, change the size and position of status graphs, tabs, and the background clock.

The other configuration panel is accessed by tapping the FlashDash (FD) icon in the System Tray at the bottom of the screen.


Figure 10: Configuring themes and other options from the FD icon.


Figure 11: Other configuration options from the FD icon.

Here, you can select the overall Theme you want to use, change the look-ahead timeframe for Tasks and Appointments, select which information you want displayed and the interface style. On the review version, only the bluesteel style was available. I suspect that in the released version, the debug selection will be removed.

Documentation
Documentation on how to use the features of FlashDash is a bit sparse at this time. But hey, it’s a brand new product, what did you expect? For the most part, however, I’m not sure that having a printed manual or Help file could add much. I found the controls and labels straightforward and intuitive, and had no need to contact Gigabyte Solutions to figure out how things work (which is a credit to their design!).

Conclusions
Is Flashdash an essential, must-have application for me? Well, I'm kind of half-and-half about that. The animated background themes is basically eye-candy, but the whole application is extremely well done and very professional. The overall design is well-thought out, and I especially like having the Launcher and Running programs functionality brought right to the forefront, where it more properly belongs.

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