Fitaly Version 3 — Overview
Fitaly Version 3 is based on three main ideas:
- Making custom slides more general and even more powerful.
- Adding a launcher capability to Fitaly with an Application Bar and a list of Most Recently Used applications.
- A simplification of all option dialogs.
This Version 3 of the Fitaly technology is offered in two forms. One is based on FitalyStamp and the other on FitalyVirtual. In each case, there is a version for devices based on the older Palm OS3 and OS4, as well as a separate version that offers full support for devices based on the more recent Palm OS5.
Fully General Custom Slides
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Fitaly 2 introduced the idea of slides by direction and of custom left slides. As custom left slides became very popular, Version 3 generalizes this customization to the 8 possible directions. In addition, Version 3 makes them more powerful and easier to define. To define slides, you can proceed by direction and select one of the directions buttons. Alternatively, you can proceed by letter and define slides for all directions for a given letter. |
Slides by Direction
With a tap on the W button, you get the custom slides for the West direction – formerly called left slides in Version 2. The dialog acts as a viewer and lets you see all slides defined for that direction. For example, a slide of the letter "a" in the West direction produces an å, the default for that letter.
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If you want to edit a given slide, a tap on its line opens the editor on the right. As the example shows, the text associated with a slide can include hard line breaks and they are shown as ¶ in the overall view. |
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Slides by Letter
Tapping on the Define Letter button opens an alternate view showing the slides of all directions for a given letter.
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To edit a given slide, tap on its line and this opens an editor just as in we saw for slides by direction. To switch to another letter, tap the letter on the Fitaly keyboard. The a A toggles from lower case to upper case as shown on the right. |
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By default, Accent Caps is set to No and all directions produce the capital letter. Setting Accent Caps to Yes produces the accented forms as shown in the image.
Macros — Using Macro Keys
The sequence associated with a slide may include macros such as the backspace macro in the -year-old example shown below:
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The slide is used to append -year-old to the current text and the macro ‹back› is before the initial hyphen to delete the last character before adding. To add macros such as ‹back› tap on the keys button in the editor. |
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This display the possible key macros. Then tap on the button for the desired macro.
Slides for Special Keys
Tapping on the Define Special button allows the definition of slides for fourteen special keys:
- The five keys of the green Side Bar: Home, Calc, Menu, Find, and Toggle.
- The five keys of the Left Panel: Tab, Caps, Shift, 123, and Info.
- The two space keys: LSpace and Rspace.
- The two top keys of the Right Panel: Back and Enter.
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For each of these special keys, the dialog shows the current function obtained by a slide for each of the directions. A tap on a line opens an editor that allows new definitions. In the example on the left, the South slide has been redefined to show the Application Bar. In the absence of any redefinition, the line is blank, to show that a slide produces the Home key. |
Macros — Defining Special Keys
Macros such as ‹appbar› and ‹lastapp› are found on the popup panel displayed by the "Specials" button.
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In this example, we associate ‹lastapp› – the last application – with the East and South slides of the Caps key. (As Caps is not that much used, we may as well do something useful with it). |
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To do this, we open the editor for the East and South lines, tap on Specials and simply tap on ‹lastapp›. Similarly, we can associate other actions to slides:
| ‹appbar› | Application bar | ‹mru› | Most-recently used list | |
| ‹lastapp› | Last application | ‹time› | Display Time (if applicable) | |
| ‹off› | Power off | ‹backlight› | Toggle backlight | |
| ‹bright› | Brightness or contrast | ‹qwerty› | Qwerty keyboard | |
| ‹numeric› | Numeric keyboard | ‹default› | Default for the key |
Launch and Tap Macros
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The ‹launch› and ‹tap› macros allow some degree of automation to be achieved by custom slides. A tap on "launch" on the Specials panel displays a list of applications. Then a tap on one of the applications enters it as a ‹launch› macro in the editor. The example shows a North slide of "b" being associated with a macro launching the Bridge application. (Do not try to write a launch macro by typing its name. Using the launch special key is easier and safer.) |
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A tap on "tap" on the Specials panel creates a ‹tap› macro to produce a tap on a button. You are then asked to tap on the screen at the desired position, which is then encoded in the macro. The example shows a possible use suggested by Steve Carter. A south slide of "b" within DateBook is used to create an entry "Practice Guitar" together with an attached note. |
Opening the note editor is done by ‹command›a. Then "Music" is written in the note. Finally, ‹tap 14,148› macro closes the note editor by a tap on its Done button.
As this example shows, ‹tap› macros allow some powerful automation. The only limitation is that they can only to be used for buttons. They cannot be used to select an item of a list.
Fitaly as a Launcher
Fitaly Version 3 adds the two Launcher features that were first introduced in FitalyVirtual, the Fitaly version for machines with a virtual Graffiti area:
- The List of Most Recently Used applications
- The Application Bar.
These features have proven to be very popular on the Clié NR70 and NX70, two machines on which the hardware buttons are not easily accessible. They will be equally useful with FitalyStamp as the keyboard is the starting point of all actions.
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The list of Most Recently Used (MRU) applications is similar to that of launchers such as SwitchHack and McPhling and you can select any of these application by a tap on its line. The list includes up to 12 applications.
Displaying the MRU list is obtained by default with a South slide of the Tab key. As we saw earlier, you can also assign it to some slide of a letter or to one of the fourteen assignable special keys. |
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The second launcher feature is an Application Bar showing icons for user-selected favorite applications. The Application Bar pops up at the bottom of the screen when doing a South slide of the Home key. The Application Bar has 8 icons and its applications are not duplicated in the MRU list. This means that you can get quick access to 20 different applications by combining the Application Bar and the MRU list. |
One suggestion is to use the application bar for applications that you use so often that you can recognize them by seing the icon only. Less frequent applications will find their way to the MRU list.
Setting the Application Bar
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Assigning applications to buttons is done with the dialog displayed on the Application Bar page of the FitalySetup application. 
Tap on any of the buttons entries of the top list and then select the desired action. The assignement will be reflected by showing the selected icon on the Application Bar. |
Note that the assignable actions include all applications currently on the Palm device. They also include actions that correspond to the hardware Up and Down button, the pen swipe, and the backlight toggle.
The New Fitaly Options
All Fitaly options are now handled by a separate application called FitalySetup in the case of FitalyStamp, and FVSetup in the case of FitalyVirtual. The options are handled by different panels that can be selected with a drop-down list.
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The new menu can open FitalySetup directly at panels such as Application Bar and Custom Slides. Options that are not on the menu (such as Popup or Operations) are selected from the drop-down list. |
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The new panels should be more intuitive than the menus used in Version 2 and should make it easier to know what are the current options settings.
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For example, the Key Options dialog displayed here shows the Phone layout selected for the numeric keypad, digits of the punctuation panel going row-wise, and card suits displayed in the Umlaut Panel. |
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The Operation mode panel has several options that were already in Fitaly 2: sending keys at pen down or pen up, toggle options, and sure mode The last option — Enable on reset — is new to this version and is only operational on OS5 devices. The possible choices are On, Off, or Prompt. If you select On, Fitaly will be automatically reenabled after a reset. If you select Prompt, you will be prompted after each reset. |
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You can actually test some of the options directly from within FitalySetup. For example, you can change the Toggle sound from on to off and tap on the keyboard toggle to see the effect. Likewise, you can select the Umlaut Panel to show card suits and then tap on umlaut on the accent block to see the effect, as shown on the left. |
A similar approach is used for Popup options and Sliding options. They should be quite self-explanatory and more details are available in the help.
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Sliding options allow you to specify the number of pixels needed for a short slide and a long slide. Moves that are shorter than the minimum are not interpreted as slides. They are taken as normal taps. |
Slides can be used either only for capitalizations or for both capitalization and custom slides. In the latter more general case, you can decide which form is associated with short slides and long slides: the "a" form refers to the slides defined for lower case letters; the "A" form, to upper case letters.
Finally, the Test Options panel includes some testing tools.
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The first group provides two ways to test digitizer function. The first check box works in conjunction with MemoPad and puts in a memo the coordinates for each tap as well as the letter produced. Of course, you cannot do much else when this is active and a tap on the info key goes back directly to the Test Options panel to let you uncheck the option. The second checkbox lets you see the coordinates of each tap directly in the Test Options panel |
The second group shows the X and Y adjustments done by FitalyStamp when you do an Adjust Position. This is only informational. In some rare cases where you may have misadjusted positions beyond any possible correction, the Clear button can reset the adjustments to zero values, after which you can do another Adjust Position.
The last group is for custom slides. You may try Fix database to restore a (mildly) corrupted slides database. You may tap on Reset Options to reset all slide options to their default values, for example, if you are not getting the application bar.
Downloading and Installing Fitaly Version 3
Both a Windows Installer (recommended) and a Zip version are available. Use the Zip version if you have a Mac or a Linux system, or if you prefer to manage your own installations.
If you have used a prior version of FitalyStamp or FitalyVirtual, it must be disabled and then deleted from the device before installing Version 3.
FitalyStamp Installations
| Windows Installer | Zip Version |
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The Windows installer automatically installs all files in a FitalyStamp3 folder on your desktop computer. For the Kyocera 7135 and the Samsung SPH-i500, use the following installer: FitalyStamp3Phone.exe |
The contents have been compressed into a zip archive, which you will need to decompress (unzip) before you install the included application on your Palm organizer. For the Kyocera 7135 and the Samsung SPH-i500, use the following zip file: FitalyStamp3Phone.zip |
Once you have run the installer or extracted the zip archive, follow the installation steps indicated in the FitalyStamp Release Notes.
FitalyVirtual Installations
| Windows Installer | Zip Version |
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The Windows installer automatically installs all files in a FitalyVirtual3 folder on your desktop computer. |
The contents have been compressed into a zip archive, which you will need to decompress (unzip) before you install the included application on your Sony Clié. |
Once you have run the installer or extracted the zip archive, follow the installation steps indicated in the FitalyVirtual Release Notes.
Demo - License - Upgrades
The demo version is free and fully functional. The demo will cease to operate after ten days, after which you can get another ten-day evaluation period by uninstalling and reinstalling the demo. After registration, the software becomes a registered version usable without any time limitation.
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Registration of Version 3 FitalyStamp and FitalyVirtual is done from the About - Register panel of FitalySetup or FVSetup. (FSStatus.prc is no longer used for FitalyStamp.) The User code can be based either on the User name or on the Device serial number. Upgrading to Version 3 is free until May 15, 2003 for users who purchased FitalyStamp after October 1, 2002. For other FitalyStamp users, upgrading costs $10 and can be ordered from the FitalyStamp order page. |
Upgrading to Version 3 is free for all FitalyVirtual users.
We hope you enjoy this new Version 3.
Download FitalyStamp 3 - Windows Installer
Download FitalyStamp 3 - Zip version
Download FitalyVirtual 3 - Windows Installer
Download FitalyVirtual 3 - Zip version
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Copyright © 2003 Textware Solutions. Last modified 4 April 2003