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SkinTW! and Fitaly Virtual
March 17, 2005
“Skinning” your device is a great way to personalize it by changing the look of the virtual Graffiti area and onscreen icons. Tungsten T3 owners have long been able to enjoy this feature, and thanks to the release of SkinTW! by Alexander Pruss, Tapwave Zodiac owners now have the same opportunity. Installation is quick and simple, and requires nothing more than a HotSync to get the application onto your device. Finding skins takes a little more work; while three different skins come with the application you’ll probably want to find some more on the web. One of the best places to start is at Velo’s web site, and there are also some available at PalmGear. Once you have some skins, run the SkinTW! application. You’ll see a list of the skins on your device, and all you have to do is select the one you want and tap the “Load” button at the bottom of the screen, You’ll see your new skin instantly— it changes not only the look of the Virtual Graffiti area, but also the icons on the status bar. Some skins are simply colored variations on the standard skin, while others actually fill the entire virtual Graffiti area with paintings, fine art, or abstract desgins. My personal favorite is the “Hiroshige” skin by Alexander Pruss.
SkinTW! is really easy to use— there aren’t many options to make it confusing for new users. In addition to the Load button at the bottom left corner of the screen, there are three other buttons as well. The second button, “to SD” is rather self-explanatory— it allows you to send a skin to storage on a memory expansion card so that it doesn’t take up any precious handheld RAM. The “Rename” button allows you to specify a new name for a skin, and of course the “Delete” button trashes the selected skin if you decide that you no longer want it on your device. The menus also offer a few more options, but the only one you really need to be concerned with is the Preferences menu on the Options menu. There you can set extended skin support (which you must turn off in order to uninstall SkinTW!) and set the destination for files you move to a memory expansion card.
There’s more to skinning than pretty pictures though— some of the skins add extra functionality. One example is Velo’s skins, some of which add a numeric keyboard to the third area of the VG area, and others that add a full keyboard. Or if you’re a fan of the data entry alternative affectionately known as Fitaly, you can use SkinTW! with Fitaly Virtual. The combination finally allows Tapwave Zodiac owners to use Fitaly, which has been proven many times to be the fastest input option available for Palm OS devices. The secret lies in the carefully designed key layout, which groups the most commonly-used letters in the middle. This serves to minimize stylus movement, thus increasing speed. To access capital letters and special characters, you start in the appropriate spot and “slide” your stylus a short way before lifting it from the screen. Fitaly does have a bit of a learning curve, but it’s well worth the effort. Unfortunately, FitalyLetris, the training application, doesn’t work on the Tapwave Zodiac at the moment, but a bit of practice on your own will soon have you up to speed.
Fitaly provides a lot more than a fast input method though. One of my favorite features is easy access to punctuation marks, a tab key, and a return key. I’m pretty fast with Graffiti, but most of the punctuation marks are still hard for me to remember after all this time. With Fitaly, it’s a snap to enter exclamation points, question marks, parentheses, and more. I have two choices about how to access them. If you look closely at the Fitaly keyboard, you’ll notice that the punctuation marks share space with the numeric keyboard. In the Fitaly setup application I can determine whether I want to access numbers with a single tap and the corresponding punctuation mark with a slide, or vice versa. If you’re like me and use punctuation all the time, you may choose to access punctuation with a single tap and numbers with a slide. Either way, Fitaly can be a huge timesaver!
Conclusion
Both SkinTW! and Fitaly Virtual are extremely welcome additions to my Tapwave Zodiac. SkinTW! is fun as well as functional, and I look forward to even more skins becoming available as time goes by. I can already see the opportunity for holiday skins, as well as sports, favorite characters, and other themes. And Fitaly is an enhancement that will keep me from reaching for my IR keyboard quite so often in the future. I write a lot of articles on the go, and I’ve often been frustrated by Graffiti— not necessarily speed so much as problems remembering the gestures to punctuation marks and from occasional problems with character recognition. With Fitaly I’m faster and much more accurate. There are a few limitation though; as mentioned earlier FitalyLetris does not work on the Tapwave Zodiac, and at the moment, Fitaly only works in portrait mode, not landscape.
SkinTW! requires a mere 47K of space on your Tapwave Zodiac, with third party skins ranging in size from 50K to 300K. Registration is only $8, and well worth it. Fitaly Virtual requires about 350K of space, and costs $25 (with special pricing available for FitalyStamp and Fitaly for PocketPC users). SkinTW! is free for users of FitalyVirtual.
PocketGoddess Rating for SkinTW!: 
PocketGoddess Rating for Fitaly Virtual: 
