[Request] Staturs Bar mapper

[Church Punk]

I think many users will like to have an application that remaps the statusbar of the T|... series (and LD i guess), or at least some of the silk buttons.

It seems that the Grafitti everywhere silk button is not used that much, and the alert (!) symbol is totally useless.

I would rather have a battery status instead of the "!" button. With a "real-time" status of the battery, skinable ofcourse ;). Maybe other users can suggest some ideas for the grafitti button. I guess the other buttons are quite ok...

So who is with me? :rolleyes:

[cyberdude]

I am! I think you would need an app that would let you remap almost any icon on the statusbar. For instance I really don't use BT, so I would remap that. I don't use the GA button either.

I already use mykbd to remap the find to home with favorites and recent list.

[ahsirg]

I havent looked too much into StatBar APIs, but it is probably hard, since noone has done it yet :)

[_Em]

There are two things that need to be accomplished here, one of which is fairly simple, the other which is more difficult.

First, you need to create your new icons for the statbar, and bind them to the appropriate code. This has been done by a number of people to add a home button (with history) to the statbar.

Second involves polling the battery for current voltage and updating the correct icon location based on the current readout. This is more complex, and would probably involve writing a statbar applet similar to the ones used for WiFi and the clock. This applet would then run in the background, feeding the appropriate graphic to the statbar app a number of times per second.

Personally, I think it could replace the ! button, and could include the notification functionality (a ! shows over top of the battery when there's an unread notification).

It's kind of sad that notifications have never really been embraced by app writers; the only place I've seen them used in a way that makes use of the statbar icon is via IM clients that run in the background (the ! flashes when a new IM is available; clicking the ! brings the incoming message to the front).

I think the reason nobody's done it yet is due to the fact that everyone wants something slightly different -- as can be seen looking at the issues that came up when people started adding the home button back in.

[pokeypda]

I wouldn't mind remapping the BT, alerts or the GFA button to toggle beam receive.

[Church Punk]

so there are users that would like to have this kind of app...

about the battery thing, i guess it should be like an option, like the one on MySkin to replace the TX's search button to a home button, and with its respective bitmaps to skin the statusbar. So maybe this should go directly to a suggestion to "upgrade" MySkin to MySkin 2 :D

The rest of remaping would be another whole application i guess, the option to remap the buttons should be as simple as possible. I was thinking something like the Hi-Launcher option to select the silkbutton. There should be like a list of apps and then a "remap to" button and there we should be able to remap every button we want :)

lets get some ideas for this so at the end we come up with a clear idea of what it should be like and how it should work... then we can talk to the developers around ;) i know the ones we have in our community can do it, and i would pay a reasonable price if needed :p

pls keep the suggestions comming!

[cyberdude]

so there are users that would like to have this kind of app...

about the battery thing, i guess it should be like an option, like the one on MySkin to replace the TX's search button to a home button, and with its respective bitmaps to skin the statusbar. So maybe this should go directly to a suggestion to "upgrade" MySkin to MySkin 2 :D

The rest of remaping would be another whole application i guess, the option to remap the buttons should be as simple as possible. I was thinking something like the Hi-Launcher option to select the silkbutton. There should be like a list of apps and then a "remap to" button and there we should be able to remap every button we want :)

lets get some ideas for this so at the end we come up with a clear idea of what it should be like and how it should work... then we can talk to the developers around ;) i know the ones we have in our community can do it, and i would pay a reasonable price if needed :p

pls keep the suggestions comming!
Church Punk, this was exactly along the lines I was thinking. The best possible app would be something like Event Launcher or the built-ib buttons preference which allowws a drop down list of all apps on your device for each icon on the status bar. Of course to the list one would have to add the specials like battery.

[Church Punk]

:)

any other suggestions? i think we need more users :D

[The New No. Two]

How about a toolbar that scrolls left and right to reveal more choices?

The scrolling would be accomplished by tapping arrow buttons at either end on the toolbar.

Different "pages" of toolbar buttons could give access to all the Prefs panels, the clipboard functions etc.

[Church Punk]

that is a nice idea, dont know if it can be implemented to palms statusbar...

if i get you right, you mean like the desktop bar you have on some linux machines, right?

still, i dont see much users interested on this kind of app (remapper) but i think we can ask for a "feature request" to Alexander Pruss ;) for the battery thing at least... and maybe a whole new program to remap each silk button like a general request?

[The New No. Two]

if i get you right, you mean like the desktop bar you have on some linux machines, right?

Yes, well actually I was thinking of something a bit simpler, but with the same basic functionality.

The Linux toolbar does actually scroll, but the Palm one could simply page from one set of 9 buttons to the next set of 9 buttons. Much easier to code, I expect, since the arrow button on page one simply selects page 2, and the arrow button on page 2 simply selects page 3 and so on.

This would require a remapper that can create more than one version of the toolbar, plus a new function to select the next toolbar.