Sometimes I do think that the normal standby screen with the Today menu seems a little inadequate. Yes, it's very useful, but it lacks the nice looking interfaces one may find in other Windows Mobile phones and devices. The UIQ one seems to pale in comparison when even compared to the S60 Active Standby.
What can I do? Well, you can choose to use GDesk, the ultimate desktop interface; but it's still in beta and at the end of the day there still isn't the nicest designs I want from the application. Hopefully more will come from it as it matures to version 1.
What I really want is nice looking Calendar though, and Desktop Agenda does exactly this. The developer of this software is vcsala, and although it's still in pre-alpha stages, I felt that this application warranted a mention on my blog.
Why? Because the idea is to allow more customisation of the UIQ interface. Although much was promised by UIQ, I still find it hardly believable that there are so many restrictions in user customisation. Why can't I place text under my icons in the main menu? Why MUST the main menu icons be placed in such an order?
But back to the program. For a pre-alpha release, it's quite an achievement. Yes, there are quite a few bugs, most notably the crashing of the application at random times, but it has the potential to complete the job of displaying "today" and "tomorrow" dates quite well on the standby. Hopefully the application can approach beta release as I mention this on the blog.
UIQ really needs to fulfil more of their promises - they simply can't rely on users creating applications like these to fulfil what the users want.
You can check out DesktopAgenda right here.
Filling up your standby screen...
Posted by DaMuffinMan | 5.12.07 | freeware, p1i, Reviews, software, uiq 3 | 2 comments »
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Hey, pretty cool app. Hasn't crashed yet for me anyway but ten minutes isn't anything to brag about. I've been really anoyed with the cumsy stanard today screen.
Is there a way of removing the phone operators name so that that row could be used by the program?
Hey Xtream
Love your blog man, so keep doing what you're doing, great stuff.
What does desktop agenda do better than the built in standby application? The built in one shows me everything i need like new messages from Yahoo!, calendar, inbox, tasks, etc. From the picture you posted, Desktop Agenda only shows calendar? Does it display the other stuff? I kind of like my standby screen the way it is, I just wish that it would return to that default state after a while. For example if I clicked on the arrow above the application icons in order to see the rest, then it stays that way, and the "today" info stays hidden. That's something they should fix in my opinion.
Let's hope that UIQ3 ups the game a little bit. They're falling behind on a lot of UI features. The OS is still not comprehensive enough for a smartphone. No printing facility or drivers, although some users claim that its worked via bluetooth, haven't tried that yet. ... a quite a few other things...