ZLauncher
1 March 2004
I have to admit right up front that I'm not a big fan of third party launchers. I've tried nearly all of them, but somehow I always seem to uninstall them and go back to the stock Palm "Home" screen. While it's not perfect (I often have to supplement it with PowerRun for SD card support) the default launcher that came with the original Pilot hasn't had to change much over the years. Jeff Hawkins and company pretty much got that one right the first time.
And yet third party applications that take the place of the Palm Home screen and launch other applications is one of the most active product categories on the Palm. While the stock launcher May do the job, people seem driven to dress it up and make it, uh, fancier.
I understand this, even if I don't really get into it much. The Today screen on my Microsoft Smartphone is the default "Luna" theme, and I typically only have a few Today screens on Pocket PCs I use, all simple and varying mostly in color/mood. I've asked myself why people put so much time and effort into something they'll only rarely see (in theory, you should only have to look at your launcher long enough to run the next application you want to use), but I realize that the drive to personalize is strong. Unlike (ironically-named) PCs, which May be used by co-workers or family members, PDAs are intensely personal computers. If you're carrying it around with you everywhere, it helps to feel that it's really yours, and no one else's. The same phenomenon can be seen in cell phone cases and face plates.
So while I understand the drive to use slick, fancy program launchers, I plugged along with the boring old Home screen for many years. But now I may have to change my tune. ZLauncher does so much that I have to keep using it in spite of myself.
Not to say that ZLauncher doesn't have plenty of eye candy. It's the most configurable launcher I've ever seen, and can be set up to look like anything you want. Simple or complex, spartan or using a different wallpaper image for every category. There are skins and icon sets galore for ZLauncher, and some of them are quite beautiful. I'm particularly fond of a skin that mimics the look of the Mac OS X desktop.
But that's not why I use ZLauncher.
I use ZLauncher because it's far more functional than the Palm Home screen. It takes the place of several other tools I had been using, and gives me a more cohesive way to work with my Palm.
I have ZLauncher set up as simply as possible. Plain white backgrounds, no wallpaper, and only the top button bar visible. On that I have the time, battery percentage, free memory, icons for the trash can and file manager, and a dropdown for my categories. That's it. Not all that different, at first glance, from the Home screen.
But the difference is in the details. First off, each screen is set up for a different number of icons. My "Main" category uses large icons in a four by four grid, with smaller text to keep it from looking too cluttered. This gives me the ability to show sixteen apps without scrolling, something I couldn't do on the three by four grid of the Home screen. The next category, however, is "System." I have a lot of stuff in here, so I use small icons, larger text to offset the harder to see icons, and four columns by five rows. Again, no scrolling, and the icons, the full size icons for low resolution screens, are still better looking and more discernable than the tiny "list mode" icons used by the Home screen.
When I need to recategorize applications, all I have to do is tap and hold on the icon. This gives me a pop-up menu that allows me to copy or move the application to the card (more on that later), trash it, change the category, beam or email the application or bring up an info screen that allows me to change attribute bits (for example, mark the application as hidden). This is much more convenient than going to the Home screen's Category screen every time I need to move something. This makes moving apps to new categories a snap. I'd like the ability to "copy" an icon to a different category, so I could keep pedit in both Writing and Media, but that's one of the few things ZLauncher can't do. I suspect this is because it has the ability to overwrite your system category information so that if you do have to drop back to the Home screen, you have the same categories and icons as in ZLauncher, if not as intelligently laid out.
A bigger deal, though, is the file manager. ZLauncher comes with a built-in file manager that rivals Filez in power, thus making Filez unnecessary on my Palm. A simple tap on the file cabinet icon at the top of my screen invokes the file manager. I can toggle between RAM and the storage card, sort on any of the file attributes (sorting on Creator ID is a great way to see all the databases related to a given application all in one place) and I can copy or move anything to anywhere. ZLauncher uses a tree view folder browser for the card, making moving files from one place on the card to another much easier than in files, where you'd have to write the destination path (/Palm/Programs/ZLauncher/) in manually. I use the file manager a lot for housecleaning, especially sorting the RAM view by descending size to see and potentially clear anything that's taking up too much space.
Another great way to save space on a Palm is to move less frequently-used applications to the storage card. ZLauncher provides two different ways to do this, each with their own pros and cons. The each is initiated the same way: tap and hold on an application's icon and select "Move to Card" from the pop up menu. Then you see a dialog box that gives you two choices. First, you can move the application to /Palm/Launcher/ where they'll be seen by the Home screen and be part of the "Card" category. Only the program itself is moved this way, while any data files or resource databases it May have will remain in RAM. This is the "safest" way to move programs, since it relies on the built-in PalmOS mechanism for running applications off of cards. I use it for small stuff, but for bigger applications, there's a better option.
Rather than putting applications in /Palm/Launcher/ you can store them in any other folder on the card (the default is /Palm/Programs/ZLauncher/Apps/) and create a "shortcut" to them in RAM. This works just like shortcuts in Windows or aliases on the Mac. A small (about 1k) stub program is created in memory with the same creator ID as the real program, and when run it calls the real program from the card, temporarily copying it to RAM for execution.
Why is this better? Two reasons. One, you can move associated data to the card as well as the application. All of it will be copied into RAM to run, then the changed files will be moved back to the card while the rest gets deleted. Again, this works just like running programs stored on the hard drive on your desktop computer. This works great for programs that are relatively small themselves, but have a lot of supplementary files (the incredibly addictive game "Vexed" is a perfect example of this if you install all the level packs).
The second advantage to this is that it allows you, if you leave the data files in RAM, to sync applications that reside on the card. When you sync a Palm, Hotsync Manager runs through the list of conduits to see if the applications are really on the Palm. If it doesn't see the corresponding application for a conduit, it skips syncing that conduit. It only looks in RAM, so if you have, for example, VersaMail in the /Palm/Launcher/folder, Hotsync Manager will not sync your mail. The stub application created by ZLauncher tricks Hotsync Manager into thinking the application is in RAM, so the sync will proceed normally.
This latter method of moving applications to the card is the same as used by PowerRun, but if I'm running ZLauncher, who needs PowerRun?
Something else the Home screen lacks is an Undo button for program deletion. Personal computers, dating back to the original Macintosh, have had a trash can that served as a temporary holding area for stuff you thought you wanted to delete, but weren't really sure. If you changed your mind, you could always dig through the trash and pull the stuff back out.
ZLauncher gives PalmOS a trash can. It only protects you from deleting stuff from the launcher (oddly, stuff deleted in ZLauncher's file manager is instantly deleted rather than moved to the trash can), but it's better than nothing. When you delete something in ZLauncher (either by selecting "Trash can" from the tap and hold menu or dragging the file to the actual trash can), it's moved to the trash and disappears from the launcher. You can delete this stuff later when you're sure you don't need it.
Another nice touch is the battery percentage and free memory meters. You can put these at the top or bottom of the screen (I put them at the top right next to the time) and you can set them to display in text, graphics or a combination of the two. I have mine set to plain text, which is both more precise and less visually distracting than the "analog" battery gauge on the Home screen. I glance up at the top of the screen and see "72% 6.8M". Very tidy.
I love the ability to use hidden categories. Let's face it. If you've got a Palm, you've got several program icons that you never actually need to see. Things that you've got assigned to hard buttons, supplementary programs that need to be present but are never actually run, that sort of thing. I leave these in my Unfiled category and set that category to "Hidden". By default, this category does not appear when I bring up the category menu or cycle through the categories with the directional pad. If I need to see the stuff in there, I can do a quick command-H to show the hidden categories again. Intelligent use of hidden categories (which I'm still working on) makes it easy to unclutter your launcher without actually deleting anything.
ZLauncher is full of small touches that make it "nicer" than the Home screen. It remembers the categories for deleted applications so if you reinstall them, they show up where they were before. It also leaves upgraded applications where you put them. I grew weary of refiling all the components of pToolset every time Paul Nevai released an upgrade (which can be hourly).
Not a bad deal at all for only $12.
Jeff Kirvin
Jeff@writingonyourpalm.net
Click here to discuss this column.
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.