Keyboard Shortcuts on the Touch Pro

Posted by Brandon Miniman on August 27th, 2008

The Touch Pro can do keyboard shortcuts much like a Windows PC by holding the Control key and hitting a letter. So far, these are the shortcuts that I have found to work. If you discover more, post them in the comments:

Ctrl+A = Select All
Ctrl+X = Cut
Ctrl+C = Copy
Ctrl+V = Paste
Ctrl+Z = Undo
Ctrl+B = Bold
Ctrl+I = Italics
Ctrl+U = Underline
Ctrl+Q = Quite
Ctrl+E = Center
Ctrl+R = Right Justify
Ctrl+L = Left Justify
Ctrl+F = Find


Touch Diamond Memory Leak: What’s the Deal?

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 26th, 2008

You know you love the graphic. Unfortunately, it’s true. The Diamond has a HUGE memory leak in main memory. Don’t get me wrong, the Diamond is an amazing and revolutionary device, but considering some versions give you about 64K or less of Main Memory to accomadate temp files, history, loading programs into memory, etc., it’s a big issue.

I’ve encountered this problem quite a few times now and it’s a pretty annoying thing to keep having a message showing “Main memory is low. Delete some files…” or something like that keep popping up while using Opera or having the YouTube app suddenly close after buffering. Where’s this problem stemming from? Is it TouchFLO 3D? Let’s find out.
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Hack Trick: Stylus Control App

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 25th, 2008

I know I haven’t done a Feature of the Day for the stylus and its magnetic sensor, but here is an application that takes advantage of that feature. Instead of just making your Touch Diamond or Pro have its screen turn on when the stylus is pulled out, you can make it do anything you want. This software by PocketKai allows you to set programs to open, show today screen, play sounds, etc. when you pull out or put the stylus back in. I’d say this is a very useful app and would be great to use in tandem with TouchXperience, when that amazing software comes out.

By the way, keep giving me more names to replace Hack Trick. I like the one that have come in, but I want to see if anything else will come in.

Via MSMobiles, though Brandon showed me this.


Hack Trick: Spruce Up the Calculator App

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 22nd, 2008

Looks like my new feature for AllTouchSite is going to be called Hack Trick (lame name I know, couldn’t come up with anything better). The Hack Trick feature will do exactly what the name says, provide you with useful hacks and tricks for your HTC Touch device.

Today, the Hack Trick has to do with the calculator HTC did a good job of hiding Windows Moible up as much as it could with the nice and elegant TouchFlo 3D interface. Unfortunately, there are those little things that HTC blatantly forgot to change or skin. The most obvious is the Calculator app, which looks like it’s been left back in the times of Windows CE 1 or 2. Fortunately for all of us, rodol1 @ XDA-Developers has created a nice TouchFlo 3D type of calculator skin, as you can see above. This little mod makes the app a lot more finger friendly and aesthetic at the same time.

A little side note to our readers, can you come up with something better than Hack Trick? It’s starting to bug me.


Haptic Feedback for your Touch Diamond/Pro

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 21st, 2008

Thanks to jbrb who posted a list of functionality apps/hacks on XDA, you can now add haptic feedback for the phone pad of your Touch Diamond or Pro, though it would be mainly aimed at the keyboard-less Diamond.

Haptic feedback is physical feedback to a user to allow them to know when they’ve pressed something on a touch screen device. In this case, it is a small vibration that lets you know when you’ve pressed key. The longer that you press down on the button, the longer the vibration. The feedback is great even if you quickly peck at numbers on the phone pad.

Unfortunately, at this time, it only runs in the phone dialer pad. It would have been better if this feature was extended to the soft-keyboard input panels that would make typing in Opera and any other app just as easy as in the phone app. Hopefully, this will be in an update soon.

You can download the app here. Just save it to your phone and run the cab file from the explorer.

You can also visit the original thread here.


Scroll Less, See More Icons

Posted by Brandon Miniman on August 21st, 2008

The Diamond and Touch Pro really don’t take advantage of the high resolution screen in the icon displays in the Start and Settings menu. You can do a quick registry hack to make them look like they do above, where there are 4×5 icons instead of 3×4 (as is the default). This allows you to scroll less and see more.

To do this, use a registry editor:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\
Add New Key “IconConfig”

In there Add DWORD Value:
“HorizontalIconSpacing” Dec value=”112″
“VerticalIconSpacing” Dec value=”115″
“IconTitleFontSize” Dec value=”6″

Thanks to Tony for the tip!


A Closer Look at the Touch Pro’s Keyboard

Posted by Brandon Miniman on August 20th, 2008

The Touch Pro’s keyboard, as you know by now, has a dedicated row of numbers at the top, which is a welcomed addition. Other devices with a slide out keyboard, to save space, have the numbers within the letters.

The keys are pretty small, but that said, they have a good feel with a soft plastic texture on each key. They make a satisying click sound when pressed. What I don’t like is that the “position” dots on F and J keys are very small, so sometimes it’s difficult to feel for the home keys when typing.

There are a few shortcut buttons if you use the FN key, like a shortcut to Opera Mobile, Connection Mangaer, SMS/MMS, and Outlook Mobile. As is the case on the front of the device, there are no soft keys. Also missing are user-programmable hot keys, or even a Start menu button or OK button. Heh - you’d think with so many keys on the Touch Pro’s keyboard, they’d have room for the important stuff.


Color Changing Touch Diamond

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 18th, 2008

I thought I’d just post some interesting news from AllTouchSite’s parent site, pocketnow.com. One of the Senior Editors over there, Adam Z Lein, has done something very interesting to his Diamond. By baking in purple and green into the backing of the Touch Diamond and given it “color-shifting technology” with the help of a local auto shop. Additionally, fingerprints and smudge marks are said to be less visible. Can I has? :D Continue for some pics of this amazing Touch Diamond!

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I Got a Touch Pro, What do You Wanna Know?

Posted by Brandon Miniman on August 18th, 2008

Alright guys, the yellow DHL man dropped a Touch Pro on my doorstep today. The unboxing experience was the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s not as thick as pictures make it out to be. It’s less wide and tall than most phones (like the AT&T Tilt, for example), so you don’t notice the depth as much when in hand or in your pocket.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be following in Nishanth’s footsteps by posting about unique features of the Touch Pro - it’s got a few differences to the Diamond, like the keyboard (duh), microSD expansion, bigger battery, and TV-Out.

Until then - go ahead, ask me anything about the Touch Pro!


Tips and Tricks: Adding More Cities to TouchFLO 3D Weather

Posted by Nishanth Samala on August 16th, 2008

HTC Weather

Everyone has seen the Touch Diamond Weather application. It’s fun and different with all of its exaggerated animations. Like most others, I’d say the rain animation is the best. But all of this is useless if you can’t even get the weather for the city that you live in or are planning to travel to. Since HTC uses Accuweather as their source for all weather information, you would think that you could change it, but HTC taken the liberty of hiding it somewhere in the OS files. Of course, with XDA-dev being PPC hack central, there’s bound to be a way to get around this big oversight by HTC. At first there was a long and tedious method of doing this that involved a lot of hex editing, modifying TouchFLO 3D’s core and other nasty stuff that can really mess up your phone. Luckily for all of us, andreas.falke from XDA-Developers has made a nice and clean app that doesn’t even mess with all the stuff from the old method. It’s called WeatherDatabaseEditor, WDE for short. Could they be any more creative with names at XDA? :D

Here’s what you need to do:
Download WDE v1.1 from here. Make sure your Diamond has Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed. Odds are that it came with it.
Go to accuweather.com and search for your city. In the url in the address bar, after it says .com, there will be a section that goes something like /us/”state name”/”city name”, where state and city names are the names of your state and city. If you live in the US, you location code will begin with the prefix NAM and will be like this: NAM|US|”state name”|”city name”. Europe’s prefix is EUR and will be like this EUR|”country name”|”country area”|”city name”. It is similar for other continents and countries
Open WDE v1.1 and add you city. Then close the program.
Go back to TouchFLO 3D’s weather tab. You can now add your city from the list.


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