Windows Phone Thoughts: Today, I Get Moving -- a Review of Animated Today v3.0

Installation
Installation of Animated Today is almost exactly the same as FlashDash. A self-extracting .exe file is loaded on your PC which, when executed, uses the ActiveSync program installation routines. There are two parts to the installation which the routine will handle for you. During the installation of Animated Today, the routine will check to see if the Macromedia Flash Player for Pocket PC is present and if not, will proceed to install that first, then return to installing Animated Today. As mentioned above, Flash Player requires about 880K and Animated Today needs about 1.2M of main memory. As with Flashdash, this application is definitely not recommended for installation on CF or SD cards.

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

Configuration
Configuration of Animated Today is fairly straightforward. There are basically two interfaces for selecting which theme you would like to use. The first is through the regular Start/Settings/Today screen we are all familiar with.


Figure 3: Selecting your theme from the Appearance tab.

And, of course, if you want to see the animations, you need to select Animated Today as one of the Today Screen items.


Figure 4: Turning on Animated Today via the Items tab.

Themes can also be selected by tapping on the Animated Today icon placed in the System Tray at the bottom of the screen.


Figure 5: The Animated Today (AT3) icon in the system tray.

Once tapped, Animated Today presents the following screen to allow you to select a theme to display.


Figure 6: Selecting Themes from within Animated Today. (Tap the Select... button to display a list.)

Themes
As I mentioned before, Gigabyte Solutions provides 14 rather cute and fun animated themes with the package when you buy (or try!) Animated Today. I’ve included screen shots of them here in the review, but you really need to see the animation to get the humour in some. All in all, the ones supplied are well designed and well done.

Additional animated themes can be obtained from:

• pocketthemes.com;
  
• pocketpcthemes.com;
  
• davidtheme.com (very fishy);
  
• Truth In Design;
  
• comstudios.com.

Conclusions
As I mentioned, I like this kind of application because it does one thing, and it does it very well. I took a quick google out on the Internet and found a number of animated theme generators, so those of you with an artistic bent could ‘roll your own’. The only thing I could think to add to this product might be a theme manager to let you cycle through animated themes to get a different perspective every once in a while.