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!

There’s a new competitor in the smartphone field, looking to take some of those high-end smartphone users away from the regular devices. Meet the S740, which looks strikingly like the Touch Pro, except a lot thinner and has a keypad on the front. But here’s the big difference: the HTC S740 is the a Windows Mobile Smartphone, meaning it does not have a touch screen for input. Oh no! No TouchFLO 3D! Don’t worry, the HTC S740 borrows a lot of elements from the Touch Diamond and Pro, if you couldn’t already tell by the exterior. One of these is the nice stylized sliding panels. (T-Mobile Shadow/HTC Juno users: look for my S740 based ROM soon!). Looks like this is the new way all HTC devices will look, though I can see this to become kind of boring and repetitive soon.

No features known of as of now, but keep looking on AllTouchSite for updates.

Via Engadget

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.

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

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!

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.

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!