How to get the most out of your today screen

Feb 04 How to get the most out of your today screen
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"These ideas are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making the most of your Today screen. Creative developers have come up with Today add-ins that can put everything from an extended weather forecast to up-to-the-minute RSS feeds right at your fingertips. All you have to do is decide which kinds of information you want to have at your fingertips, and in no time you can transform your Today screen from a boring home base to an information-packed productivity tool." - Says Brad Adrian (author of that great article recently posted at the Microsoft web site)

I used to take my Today screen for granted, not really paying attention to all it has to offer. Then, I found out how easy it is to transform it into both a great launching pad for all of my work and a time-saving synopsis of my Microsoft Outlook Mobile applications.

You can quickly make your Today screen much more functional by changing the way the Today screen items appear. Tap Start > Settings > Personal tab>. Tap Today, and then tap the Items tab. Here you can choose the items that show up on the Today screen, the order they appear in, and the display options for the items.

Changing the Calendar options on the Items tab really helps me keep track of my daily schedule. By tapping Calendar and then tapping Options, you can make sure that your Today screen Calendar shows not only your next appointment, but all of your upcoming appointments for that day.

If you like to keep all of the Today screen items displayed and have a lot of upcoming appointments, your Today screen can get cluttered pretty quickly—you might need scrollbars to see everything. But if you change the default text size on your Pocket PC, you can cram more items onto your Today screen. Tap Start > Settings > System tab, and tap the Screen icon. Then select the Text Size tab. By moving the slider, you can easily make the font size smaller (or larger, for that matter).

Personally, I find the next-to-smallest size works best for me; but if you've got a VGA device (and younger eyes than I do) the smallest text size might work for you.

A lot of Pocket PC users like to be able to easily see what their battery status and memory status are at all times, so adding some form of monitoring utility to the Today screen is fairly popular.

The screens that appear earlier in this article show Omega One's Battery Pack or Battery Pack Pro v 2.1, but others—like Battery Meter from Wireless Design Technologies and iPAQ Panel included with the RhinoSuite Software Collection from RhinoCode Technologies (iPAQ Panel comes pre-installed on some HP iPAQ devices)—work just as well.

Some utilities, like Omega One's Battery Pack Pro and PocketPlus from SPB Software House let you add both battery and memory status monitors and application shortcuts to your Today screen. I used to think that adding a bunch of shortcut icons to my Today screen made it look more cramped than Jimi Hendrix fans at Woodstock, but once it was clear how many screen taps could be saved each day, thanks to the shortcuts, I didn't mind a few more icons.

Now, if you really want to juice up your Today screen and tweak it to show as much information as possible, applications like Pocket Informant from WebIS , Agenda Fusion from Developer One, and Pocket Breeze from SBSH can help. With these applications, you can add things like scrollable and collapsible Calendar lists and searchable Contacts lists. As you can see, these kinds of applications can really fill up a Today screen, but they can also make it much easier to get to all the information you've got stored on your device.

Finally, using different themes and background images can spice up and personalize the appearance of your Today screen. There are tons of themes available online (don't ask me how many themes are in a ton) and you can even make your own, if you like. You can learn more about using themes on your Windows Mobile-powered Pocket PC in "Personalize Your Device."

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