Teksoft - Future Teknology

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Smartbar

Smartbar
The Smartbar is a complete software suite, that offers vital functions for a Mobile Device user. Its main functionality is concentrated arround two components: the BAR interface and the Close Button.

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Smartbar, the BAR component
The BAR is a task-organizer, created in the XP style, with a quickmenu with three options, a taskbar with the active tasks and a system tray area that currently supports the clock indicator with date, and the battery indicator:

If the number of tasks in the taskbar is bigger then the available locations, two scroll arrows, components of the BAR would appear automatically, and allow the user to scroll through the item list:

The user can interact with all the components of the BAR. The quickmenu contains three icons:
First, the My Device icon, allows the user to start one of the four great utilities installed with the Smartbar Suite The Ultra Keyboard,The Screen Capture,The Task Manager or The Network Tools. You can also access the manual on the device (option Help) or to terminate the Smartbar.
This second icon toggles the Taskbar. The BAR will now show all the tasks running on the device in the Taskbar section. The user can tap a task, or even tap and hold for more options. Also all the today plugins are visible so the user can interact with his/her device easier. A detailed description of the Taskbar can be found here
The third icon toggles the Desktop. It is similar to the Windows XP Desktop. Here the user can configure a background by tap and hold, and he/she can have multiple programs on it that can be started with a single tap. New in version 1.2 is the possibility to Add Control Pannel Applets from all the .cpl files installed in the device, to sort the items and many other great features. More on this on the the Desktop section

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The Taskbar
Toggled by the second icon of the Quickmenu, the Taskbar offers an easy way to interact with the tasks running on the device. Similar to Windows XP, the Taskbar shows the tasks as buttons with a nice icon related to that particular application. The user can use the stylus or the keyboard pad to navigate through them. Also there are scroll arrows but those appear only when needed:

Pressing the enter key when a task is selected or tapping on it directly, would switch to that task instantly. A longer press with the enter key or with the stylus (a tap and hold) would result in opening a context menu with many options:

Cancel closes this popup (or press key left)
New Task opens a dialog where you can browse for the new task to open
Switch to has the same effect as tapping on the task directly (switches to that task)
Hide Task hides the task by making it invisible (Note: 1) you will have to use the Task Manager to see your Task 2) This option doesn't close the task, it will continue to run as an invisible window)
Close Options that would open another popup allowing you to chose among several methods of closing your tasks: Close Process, Close Task, Close All, Close All But Active. Note that system tasks (windows created by the shell32.exe process cannot be terminated using the Taskbar, as a safety measure. Still you can use the Task Manager for advanced purposes)

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The Desktop
While most of the available commercial applications (generic name task managers) barely offer a today plugin to organize your applications, we have prepared a full screen size Desktop! Smartbar's User can add his/her favorite applications or control pannel applets to this Desktop. Yes, Smartbar supports Control Pannel Applets, with a few clicks you can add nice icons for Battery, Storage Space, Screen Brightness, Device Information and even Bluetooth, Beam or Wireless LAN icons! directly into your Desktop.

With lots of favorite applications on the Desktop, it is important to have some good management functions, so additionally we offer Sort capabilities for your items, deletion of items that become obsolete. The user can obtain detailed Information regarding a particular desktop item, delete all the items or change the Desktop's background. For the background JPG images are supported and the best image size would be 320x268 pixels. The image is resized to fit the Desktop so other image resolutions can be used too. The JPG image can be selected from the internal memory or from a memory card.

We have installed a couple of backgrounds in the 'backgrounds' folder located inside Smartbar's main folder (\program files\teksoft\smartbar\backgrounds).
The user can Tap and Hold any item on the Desktop to access the context menu:

For getting the best out of your device, you can add control pannel applets to your Desktop. All the .cpl files installed in your device can be opened to choose the applet you need to add to the Desktop:

Also the user can drag and drop the items on his/her Desktop to arrange them in any custom way. For the applets that do not have an appropriate icon (mostly on VGA devices, some of the applets do not export the proper sized icon) we have added a default question mark bulb icon.
Having so much space at the user's discretion, the Smartbar Desktop is one of the best Task - Organizers available!

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The System Tray
Introduced with Windows, the system tray is located in the Windows taskbar usually at the bottom and contains miniature icons for easy access to system functions. In this version, the Tray shows the date and the battery percentage. Clicking the date indicator will bring the Clock Application so you can adjust the time or setup an alarm.
Smartbar disables the Microsoft Date Today plugin, so you can gain one extra plugin space in your Today Screen.

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The Close Button
Located in the upper right corner of your display, the Close Button replaces the standard one to offer improved functionality and lots of useful options. Depending on your settings, the Close Button may appear as one of the graphic layouts:

By default, the first icon is selected. Pressing it, would send the active window to the background, so the task is not closed.
The OK icon can be used for some dialogs, that usually would have the ok symbol.
The third icon with the 'x', would close your task or open window (not just send them to the background so its easy to free the memory they were using).
Finnaly the forth icon brings a context menu that is very usefull when you want to take different actions for different task.
Please note that some actions are not allowed for some tasks. The user can't use the X button to close a system window. To protect the user and his/her data, we have created a system that check if the user's action is safe. In case the user tries to close a system window, or to press OK button to a non-ok dialog, the Close Button would deny that action and an error sound would be played.
Doing a tap and hold on the Close Button, would also bring up the context menu.

On Click allows the user to select the default action for the Close Button. This option also reflects in one of the 4 image representations the Close Button can have. The possible values are presented in a popup menu:

Minimize, OK, Close, Close All, Close All But Active control the current task (the active window). Its a good idea to use these options (by tapping and holding the Close Button) when the user needs to take different actions for different Tasks. The Close Button can only perform on action at a time, accordingly to its current configuration, but from this Popup menu, the user can quickly choose a different action. Again, the safe mechanism would disable some of these options for system windows.
Switch to opens a popup menu containing all the running Tasks, Tapping on any of them would switch to that task instantly
Close Task Similar to the Switch to option, opens a popup menu containing all the running Tasks, Tapping on any of them would close the task.
New Task Opens a file browser so you can start any new task.
Tools Offers a popup menu with several useful options: Soft Reset, Suspend, Running Programs Applet, Remove Programs Applet to control and conserve the resources on the device.
Smartbar Align allows the user to move the BAR interface to the left,bottom,right or top of the screen. This can also be done by drag and drop directly on a free area of the BAR.

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Ultra Keyboard
The UltraKeyboard is an advanced module that will greatly enhance your typing speed and not only. Using the UltraKeyboard you can define combination of keys (triggers) and assign different actions for each of them. The interface offers all that you need for configuring the combinations and the actions. Some actions also require a Parameter. The UltraKeyboard can be used only with Hardware Keyboards, so the SIP is excluded. Note that not all the Mobile Devices are equiped a Hardware Keyboard.

Ultra Keyboard is a great typing assistant. In this new version you can define multiline phrases to be added when the trigger is pressed. Mail signatures, HTTP addresses that are hard to remember, passwords and almost everything can be stored and typed with the UltraKeyboard! And this is only one of the six great features! By default, we have configured 6 triggers for your UltraKeyboard. You can double click any of them for editing purposes, or you can tap and hold any entry for more options (Add/Delete). You can also tap and hold on an empty space in your list, for the Add option only.
Wheter you choose Add or Edit, your keyboard focus will be moved to the "Trigger" textbox. To delete the content in the textbox you can ONLY use the backspace key on your Hardware keyboard. Also a new trigger can be set by using the Hardware keyboard's keys. At this point the good news is that you can use any key on your Hardware Keyboard, including the control keys (the non alphanumerical ones).
There are several actions that can be configured:
Replace with phrase : when the user types the trigger (in Pocket Word for instance), the trigger keys are replaced with the text set as a Parameter. eg: GRE -> Replace with phrase -> Best regards, John . By typing "GRE" you will get the predefined text, "Best regards, John". This is a great feature for Pocket PCs where typing is quite difficult because of the small keyboards. By setting the proper triggers you can write long emails in seconds!
Execute a file : you can use this option to start a particular program with a combination of keys. Type in the key combination for the trigger, then double tap the Parameter textbox to browse for your file. Any file can be selected: executables, images, sounds. You will have your file opened in no time by the proper application (images opened in the Album, sounds in the Media Player, etc)
Turn device off : You can easily turn off your device. This action doesn't require a Parameter.
Reset device : You might need this option, freqvent on most of the Desktop Computers but missing on your Pocket PC. With the selected trigger, you can reset your device in no time!
Call number : We know that you will love this feature! Assign phone numbers to different key combinations and the Ultra Keyboard will make the calls for you. eg: You can select "CALL" as the trigger, Call number the action and the type in the phone number as a Parameter, and simply pressing the trigger combination of keys will dial your number. This is much better then any Fancy Contacts List, Photo Dialer or other similar dialers. You can have a trigger for all of your favorite numbers, UltraKeyboard allows you to setup as many as you need!
Screen Capture : Yes, we have prepared everything for you. With the right combination, you can have Snapshots of your Mobile Device's Screen. UltraKeyboard works with the Multishot Screen Capture. Each time you press the trigger selected for this action, the screen image will be saved according to the settings in the Screen Capture module. Press the trigger and enjoy hearing the nice camera shutter sound that indicates the capture was successful. More on the Screen Capture can be found here: Screen Capture.
Rotate Screen Just press the trigger (default: ROT) and have your screen rotated to one of the four possible positions! No other tools would offer the complete screen rotation configuration.

As you can see the UltraKeyboard makes your Pocket PC experience a lot easier and a lot more interesting. In this new version (1.2) we have even improved the user interface so all gets easier for you. Feel free to try out the default triggers/actions and to create many more to suit your needs.

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Screen Capture
The Screen Capture is a complex tool for creating snapshots of your Mobile Device's screen. All the possible Screen Sizes and Resolutions are supported, including QVGA and VGA. With the Screen Capture you'll be able to:
Select the folder where the snapshots are created
Choose the capture format: BMP (raw image) or JPG (compressed image)
Choose the level of compression for the JPG format
Select the Zoom level for obtaining images up to 300% of the normal size (you can use this to create bigger snapshots), up to 200% for big VGA snapshots
Select the Multishot mode for creating multiple captures. These can be used to create animated sequences for presentation purposes or...just for fun.
Choose the Frames per Second for the Multishot, we have added lots of combinations, more then you will even need
Choose the interval for the multishot capture process
An aproximation for the required storage space is also displayed
Screen Capture supports command-line parameters:
-instant
-output:[path],
-format:[BMP|JPG],
-quality:[0-100],
-zoomoption:[0|1|2],
-sounds:[YES|NO],
-multishot:[YES|NO],
-fpsoption:[0-6],
-stopoption:[0..5]
for starting Screen Capture as a standalone application from other third party programs.

eg: screencapture.exe -instant -output:"\storage card" -format:jpg -quality:50 -zoomoption:1 -sounds:YES -multishot:YES -fpsoption:4 -stopoption:2 will make screen shots stored on the Storage Card, using JPG compression with 50 quality factor, the zoom set to 200% (0=100% 1=200% 2=300%), will play sounds for each capture, it will work in multishot mode using a 1Frame/1Second capture rate (fpsoption: 0 = 1f/1min, 1= 1f/30s, 2=1f/10s and so on..),and it will stop after 1 minute (stopoption: 0=10s 1=30s 2=1minute and so on..) so it will create aprox. 60 JPG images on your SDCard.
in case the command line for starting the Screen Capture contains syntax errors, the user will receive the appropriate warning messages and the capture won't continue.

The Start button can be used to trigger the screen capture. There is an initial delay that will allow the user to get to the desired location where the screen must be captured. New in this version is the bigger initial delay: 10s.
By configuring a trigger in the UltraKeyboard the user can make snapshots using predefined keys or key combinations for making the Snapshots, instead of the Start button.

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Task Manager
The version 1.2 of the Task manager brings new exciting features:
Process Priority settings unique concept for Pocket PC it allows you to make your processes run faster or slower. Do you want to add more CPU power to a specific application? Does your software run too slow? Use Task Manager for all of these problems!
Try to start an MP3 in Media Player then set Media Player's priority to IDLE (wmplayer.exe process), you will see that the MP3 would be hardly played. Task manager offers great control over your Mobile device.

Complete processes list, including hidden windows, windowless processes and other tasks
Safe protection for not so experienced users with additional warnings for the sensitive options
CPU usage indicator for each process
CPU priority indicator! No other Task Manager offers this
Close All Applications, Terminate All Processes and Save List to File (csv format can be opened with Excel on the Desktop Computer)

Lots of settings that permit user customization

The Task Manager allows the user to better control the processes running on the mobile device. It provides a list with the running processes and for each process the user can see it the process has a window or not, it that window is visible,its title and class name, and the most important, the ammount of Heap memory consumed by that process and the CPU load.
The user interface offers 6 buttons that will allow the user to Refresh the process list, to Hide a visible window or to make visible an invisible one, to enter the advanced section for a process, to terminate a process with the End Task (it will close the process for real, not just send it to the background). The Switch to button would bring the window of a process to foreground, and New task would allow you to browse for an executable to start as a new process. Additionally, for the New task function, you can specify a parameter.
The bottom indicators show the Storage memory as well as the Program memory and the Global CPU usage.
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Network Tools
The Network Tools consists of a ping utility and a trace utility. They help testing and debugging network and/or Internet connections. For the Ping, an 'Echo' command is sent to a specified Host Name and then waits for a response. The result is a report that displays the success or failure, a report back of a timed response in seconds. The trace-route uses ping to follow the path from host to host to the intended destination.

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Trial Version
The Smartbar installs itself as a trial version that can be used for 16 days without any limitation. After the trial version expired, the user need to register or to uninstall his/her software.

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Skins
The Smartbar Suite supports skins. The skins can be downloaded as .cab files and installed on the device as any other application. Once installed they will customize the entire graphic layout of the smartbar.

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