Quick Tour

Apt can do an amazing range of things. Below is a quick run through.

The first part of Apt consists of 2 screens of preferences for each application on your device, allowing you to choose 'environmental' settings:

prefs.png
prefsplus.png

Most of the settings are obvious from the screenshots. The 'Lock Triggers' allow you to lock each app individually using any 3 of the triggers that Apt provides (You could say 'press hard1, navigator left, tap middle of screen', or 'insert SD card called key, press power button, enter graffiti letter c' etc etc).

Secondly, Apt also has three screens of triggers-and-actions, which say, for each application or for the system as a whole, what Apt should do when a particular event occurs:

graffiti.png

Current triggers (>50!) are:

  • Buttons: hard buttons 1-4, 5-way navigator switch or button, Option + Hard 1-4(Treo), pressed, or held for specified number of seconds
  • Buttons: Side button (Treo), Volup/Down (Treo), Launch/menu/find screen buttons, power button
  • Graffiti: ronamatic stroke, screen tap, fixed stroke, relative stroke, letter (a-z), digit (0-9), $, Backspace, Space, full-stop (taps and strokes are anywhere on the screen)
  • Events: app-about-to-launch, app-just-launched, app-about-to-exit, form-id/name x-about-to-open, form-has-loaded, form-has-exited, hotsync finished, device-has-reset, idle-for-x-seconds (once, repeat-after-input, repeat forever), input-after-x-seconds, card-mounted-with-name-x, card unmounted, system-woke-up, command-bar-about-to-come-up, command-bar-just-disappeared, DIA-just-came-up, DIA-just-went-down, control-x-just-got-tapped, menu-item-x-just-got-selected, the time is now xx:yy, the-of-the-hour-is-now-yy, a-peripheral-got-(dis)connected, network-just-(dis)connected

Screen strokes and taps can be recorded and redisplayed in the target app itself:

sstroke.png

In this example, tapping on the picture of the baby's dummy will launch the Calc application, a stroke downwards from the top right corner will launch the Crimson app (these are not suggested as useful settings…)

Most of the triggers above can be used to perform most combinations of the following actions:

  • Launch: application, DA, panel, last application, application-by-letter (enter 'co' for apps starting with 'co'), recent x applications, four different lists of favourite applications
  • Show time, date
  • Increase, decrease, increase %, decrease %, set, restore screen brightness
  • Rotate left, rotate right, open/close/toggle DIA, toggle status bar (for appropriate device)
  • Toggle, set or disable on-screen graffiti, toggle on-screen graffiti ink
  • Bring up keyboard dialog (alpha,numeric,intl.)
  • set DIA arrangement: classic, tri-area, keyboard
  • set DIA keyboard style (8 choices: caps, international, numeric etc)
  • IR enable, disable, toggle
  • Tap, enable, disable a control (buttons, push buttons, popup lists, selectors, checkbox)
  • Scrollbar up or down
  • Simulate any menu item
  • Field: enter, copy, cut, paste, undo, start, end, select
  • Simulate: hard buttons 1-4, 5-way navigator switch/button or Treo keys (side, opt+hard1-4) (also multiple presses)
  • Simulate (possibly a string of) graffiti characters
  • Simulate pen taps
  • Call up command bar, optional activate menu shortcut
  • Apply Apt setting of any application
  • Send a reset launch code to an application
  • Apt functions: show strokes/taps, record tap/stroke, add tap/stroke, increment/clear a variable
  • Apt list functions: list menu, field, control, form resource IDs, get screen coordinate
  • Misc: goto a specific form, pause x milliseconds, turn device off, reset device, trigger-lock any action (not just app launch), palm lock, set auto-off, beep
  • some others which never got documented

Combinations of actions can be run consecutively (a macro), or be shown in a list:

letterlist.png

The list menu above has dynamic elements (launching apps starting with 'c') and fixed elements ('Dice121' and the date).

Selections can also be shown in a 'star' menu:

star.png

The star menu is extremely quick and intuitive, because the functions are mapped to and arranged like the hard keys. In the image above, pressing navigator down disables IR (which is currently on). The four bottom buttons are assigned to the hard keys.

Macros, star menus and lists can all have individual items which are themselves macros, star menus or lists (nesting). So you can have a star menu of lists, or a macro that performs some action and then brings up a star menu of macros and more star menus.

Finally, here are just a few uses you might put Apt to, I'm sure you can think of more:

  • set IR always off except in apps where you need to beam
  • have on-screen graffiti only where you need it (it can get in the way other places)
  • turn off those annoying system sounds, except for in your speaking dictionary app
  • keep prying eyes away from particular apps, but access them quickly yourself
  • have different colour themes for different apps
  • calls up your most-used apps and functions extremely quickly
  • different macros for differet programs
  • launch apps extremely quickly by letter. Just start writing whenever a field does not have focus (see 'list menu' above).
  • enable all apps that require it after a soft reset
  • dim brightness slowly down in some apps to save energy when you're not using them. As soon as you tap, restore brightness to normal.
  • scroll with pen strokes either in a fixed position or anywhere on the screen
  • use your 5-way navigator with older games that only read hard keys usually.
  • disable buttons when you don't want your palm accidentally turned on
  • make a little diagonal stroke in the corner of the screen to rotate it
  • call up different applications depending which SD card you insert
  • setup a 'loop' of applications: use the same button to cycle through the applications in the loop.
  • clear a fields text with a single swipe through the middle
  • have a star menu with your most used apps always on the 5-way navigator and the most recent apps handy below
  • turn on onscreen graffiti when command bar comes up, turn off when it's gone
  • I could go on and on…

Other parts of this site explain all this in greater detail. Enjoy!

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