Do you remember DA's? Do you miss any of them?

[jigwashere]

Desk Accessories for Palm -- "multitasking." Remember being able to pull up a contact while writing a memo, calculating a tip while doing expenses, or discretely turning off alarms for 60 minutes to attend a meeting? Ah, the good old days. Thanks to our friend Alex Pruss, we were even able to make our own Desk Accessories from apps using Accessorizer.

I now use an Android-based smartphone and switching from one app to another is fairly simple and I can copy and paste (or even better - share!) data easily. There's even a widget to quickly configure turning of all alarms and ringers for a period of time.

DA's were da bomb! I could capture screen shots, dim the screen beyond standard settings, toggle the IR port, pause music playback, look up a password, or even interrupt work with a quick game. The possibilities were endless!

Those were the days!

[RickAgresta]

totally, TOTALLY miss them on Android. I readily admit that I haven't gone digging through everything that is out there (or even through everything I already have), but I miss DA's like AsciiPopDA, CutPaste5 and ShortCut5 (even the built-in shortcuts were great to have).

[Hook]

ASCii charts you can pop up from the background on Android are pretty numerous. I never really got into DAs much on Palm, so I don't have the same nostalgia for them. I'm not sure what a DA would do that I can't already do on Android, but, again, that may be because I never used them much.

Are you referring to having a functional pop-up over a program in the forground. How would that be different than holding home and grabbing it from there? Is it because the pop up still lets you see the screen you were working on? Is it being able to use the pop up to provide data to the program it is popped up over? Just curious.

[jigwashere]

I don't really miss DA's. I find I can do most everything pretty readily with Android. With the big screens many smartphones and tablets have, I sometimes wish I could keep two windows open side-by-side.

I really do love being able to share data among my apps. A primary example would be reading a headline in Google Reader, sharing it with Read It Later to get the full text, then sharing it with my email client to send it with comments to someone else.

I do miss the ability (or ease) of creating calender entries and incorporating contact info.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk

[Hook]

II do miss the ability (or ease) of creating calender entries and incorporating contact info.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk

I can do that. I suspect there are Calendar apps that use Google Calendar that may do that, but I don't remember. Maybe Calengoo or Business Calendar?

EDIT: Just saw your new Avatar, Jig (I momentarily switched to the skin that doesn't fully load pages). Nice!

[jigwashere]

It looks like I should be able to share between contacts and calendar, but apparently there's something preventing me from doing this with at least a dozen or so contacts. I'm not sure if it's an application defect or simple user error (simple user or simple error?).

[Varjak]

Nice new Avatar Jig. What was your original device-avatar with the juggler? I think I recall one with a static juggler?

[raspabalsa]

I miss a few DAs from my TX: PlayerControl, TealCalc, TealPhone, and a few more made using Accessorizer:RescoExplorerDA, RoadLinguaDA, and psMemosDA. However, it's more of a pshychological thing, because I don't actually feel the lack -yet- on my Player. Maybe I'm still not using it as heavily and seriously as I used my TX.

What I do really miss is Hi-Launcher. I had all relevant stats, apps, and toggles grouped in a nice menu. I may try something similar on my GP5.

I think jig's juggler used to be floating on thin air... I don't remember it having a floor before.

[jigwashere]

I think I had a static juggler for a while, then one like raspy describes. Hook used that juggler.gif and built my TP2 avatar for me which I modified for the E4GT.

[hal]

DAs were pretty good on Palm OS (and the original OS for Macs, for the case) cause they imitate the multi-tasking behavior. Or said the other way around, they cover UI gaps unable to be covered by the system's capabilities. I reckon that in an OS such as Android, it'd be more a thing of allocating apps' shortcuts, than of actually trying to install and run DAs.

Most likely, you people should be looking for programs that allow apps ribbons or something, in order to do things like popping a calculator when entering something in the calendar. I have used Accessorizer by Pruss, but my 680 didn't behave fine with it. Other devices like my Zire 31 did make it work fine, but again, that's not my main mobile device. I remember following a lengthy thread, I kinda remember lead by HeadCronie, in which a lot of DAs were mentioned or even reviewed.

Rick, I think that CutPaste5 and ShortCut5 don't meet the requirements to be considered DAs. They're mostly macro-generators and UI patches. I use FieldPlus in my Treo and I can't be more grateful for it. As anybody of you people who have used a Treo device know, Palm made a whole garble of the UI in the Treo series. FieldPlus makes it easier to cut/copy/paste. I also use ShortCut5, and I think that it deserved a little more development in order to do several more things.