Looks like Hack Attack is the new name for Hack Trick. Thanks for suggestions from everyone who answered. Today’s Attack will be a big one: modding the TouchFLO 3D interface!

Once again, the good folks over at XDA-Devs have made a great modding app. Thanks to susilange and DMAN-666 @ XDA, we can now edit TouchFLO 3D very easily. With version 0.2 of ManillaEditor, you can export each individual image and edit or replace images. It looks somewhat tedious to me, but all you graphics gurus out there are already turning ideas in your head. The program provides a very nice clean interface, but it looks like it is geared towards more of intermediate to advanced users.

For everyone else who are like me and could not ever do this kind of editing, XDA is a great source for some themes. You can find themes ranging from the O2 and T-Mobile official themes to custom themes ranging from os themes such as the iPhone or Vista theme to movie themes like Hellboy.

Let the creativity out! I hope to see some great themes appearing on our own AllTouchSite forums from all of you graphic gurus!

Not too long ago I was complaining about the memory leak and rapid memory loss on the Touch Diamond. As most Touch Diamond owners know, I’m not the only one with the problem. Luckily for us, James “Jamzb” @ XDA-Developers made a great app that graphically represents all memory usage on the Touch Diamond.

In my own test, which you can see above, Opera and TouchFlo 3D are not the biggest memory hogs. For me, it’s a temporary file. Kind of surprising, isn’t it? Turns out, it happens to be very different per user. The creator of the program posted a screenshot showing that Opera Mobile was taking up a lot of memory on his Diamond.

You can download MobileMonger from the developer’s site. Link

What’s hogging up all your memory? Post your results with Mobile Monger here.

The Touch Diamond newest variant for Sprint just got its first review. Surprisingly, this wan’t done by all the big tech sites like Engadget, CNET, BoyGeniusReport, or us! The new Touch Diamond got its first review by Wall Street Journal, who like the rest of the world, made the comparison to the iPhone. Not much new information from before, but here are it is: Wireless options are WiFi, Bluetooth, and EVDO Revision A. GPS is optimized for use with Sprint Navigation, but there is no word about how it will be with other GPS Software. Sprint TV and Music has been added to TouchFLO 3D with a spruced up theme. Also, the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite seems to be dusted off with DataViz’s DocumentsToGo suite for Office Applications. That’s not a bad thing, considering DataViz seemed to take a lot more time than Microsoft did with these mobile productivity apps. Also, the Touch Diaomond is confirmed to come in with the burgundy/red back for the phone.

With a 1340 mAh battery, things seem to be looking nice for this CDMA sibling of the Touch Diamond…In fact, very nice.

Via CNET

Rog over from MobileSyrup has posted a review of the CDMA variant of the Touch Diamond for Telus Canada. Seems like the same old, same old with this variant and doesn’t lose or gain any features from the original HTC Touch Diamond. One good thing is that it comes equipped with Telus Navigator for the GPS unit, so you don’t have to buy your own. The Telus variant comes at different prices: $149.99 for a 3-year contract, $349.99 for a 2-year contract, $399.99 for a 1-year contract, and $449.99 for no contract.

Looks very sleek in the HTC Victor variant. Check out the video below:

Via MobileSyrup

Feature of the Day is back! As promised from two or three weeks ago, I’ll continue with the HTC Album software found on the Touch Diamond, though it is the same as the Touch Pro. HTC Album is a very nice improvement to the mundane and boring Pictures and Videos app supplied with Windows Mobile 6/6.1. If you access it from TouchFLO 3D, you get the elegant 3D photo and video viewer that for some reason reminds me of the Microsoft Surface table computer. With simple up or down gestures, you can move quickly from one photo or video to another.

In the actual HTC Album software, you have the TouchFlo 3D influenced interfaces and menus that are just more aethetically pleasing to the eye than the Windows Mobile app. With HTC Album, photos and videos are viewed in the same app, unlike its WM counterpart that needs Windows Media Player to play videos. This is much more convenient.

When viewing a photo in HTC Album, the picture adjusts itself to the orientation of the phone much faster than other apps that use the accelerometer. For zooming in, you spin your finger clockwise. Likewise, to zoom out, you spin you finger counter-clockwise. It’s pretty neat seeing that actually work. Another option for zooming in and out is by using the touch scroll wheel built into the hardware panel. You can pan between different photos or videos by swiping you finger from side to side on the screen. While you are viewing a picture, a single tap on the screen gets you the most convenient options with a simple TouchFLO 3D style menu for more options.

You get the same nice experience with the slideshow part of HTC Album. The default has a nice and subtle fading transition between each picture, making it very elegant. You can also change the animations and delays for the slideshow

On the whole, the HTC Album stands out as one of the most heavily worked on apps by HTC. It’s a good thing they did, as it turned out to be such a great addition to both the Touch Diamond and Pro.

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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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.

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.

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.

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!