Expand Your HTC's Hardware Buttons With AE Button Plus

[Jon Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://ae.inc.ru/aebplus_t.html' target='_blank'>http://ae.inc.ru/aebplus_t.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"AE Button Plus for HTC's Himalaya (O2 Xda II, T-Mobile MDA II, i-mate PDA), Alpine (O2 Xda IIi and similar) and Magician (O2 Xda II mini, T-Mobile compact and i-mate JAM) extends the functionality of available hardware keys on the devices above which is appreciated especially for the HTC Magician which includes four hardware buttons only, compared with the Himalaya/Alpine six buttons."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/westfall-20050525-aebutton.gif" /> <br /><br />If you're looking to expand the usage of your HTC Himalaya or HTC Magician's buttons, this might be a nice little app to try out. As Arne points out at theunwired.net, the ability to remap the volume slider (A frequent question asked about devices) is present in this utility, and right now you really can't argue with the price (Free). With the ability to map potentially up to 15 actions through double and triple presses, you'll be pressing away gleefully opening applications and scrolling documents in no time. (OK, so maybe not gleefully, but maybe happily? contentedly?)

[surur]

The XDA series of devices are really the best community supported devices in the world, and often great software such as this is produced for free by the participants.

They managed to upgrade the original xda all the way up to wm2003se, while the OEM had abandoned it on 2002 ages ago. They have recently made an upgrade available for the XDA 2 to wm 5, which does not even run yet on any other handheld.

Those people are the real definition of hackers - very talented and very helpful.

Surur

[Jon Westfall]

The XDA series of devices are really the best community supported devices in the world, and often great software such as this is produced for free by the participants.

They managed to upgrade the original xda all the way up to wm2003se, while the OEM had abandoned it on 2002 ages ago. They have recently made an upgrade available for the XDA 2 to wm 5, which does not even run yet on any other handheld.

Those people are the real definition of hackers - very talented and very helpful.

Surur

I'll have to agree with you on this. Its quite remarkable how dedicated they can be to gettting their device to be perfect. Wherever the OEM fails with these devices, the user community jumps in and "fixes" it.

[Paragon]

Those people are the real definition of hackers - very talented and very helpful.

Surur

Yeah, the XDA community is one of the best out there, right from XDA-developers to the individual developers and hackers who show more support for their freeware then many professional corporations do. :evil:

Dave

[that_kid]

I agree, it's great the things they get done and the support they have in the forums too.

[Chucky]

I dont have an imate jam yet, but an idea that I thought would be cool - not sure if this program is what I want, but basically use the answer button on the earphone cord to skip to the next track on whatever media player - but still function has answer when I am getting a call.

That way you have a half functional remote for the listening to music.

Probably more than half functional because skip is generally the only button you need because the other buttons are mostly used when you first start listening to music or when you are finishing listening - in both cases its not too much effort to actually take out the jam and press stop/play.

[GF]

The problem is the software does not support O2 XDA2s.

[MitchellO]

This software is great!!! Just loaded it to my Mini, and it is almost one handed now! I have programmed the red end call button to "Ok/Close" when you press it once, and start menu when you press twice. Also, the volume button to scrolling, and my camera button to Screensaver (from PHM PPC Plus!) and Camera!

[Daimaou]

I have a 404 :cry: can someone UL the file somewhere?

Cheers

[thanos255]

Link above is working fine for me.

[beq]

Looks great, but as mentioned earlier, I'm just curious how come there's no listed support for HTC Blue Angel (or the EVDO version)? Not that I'm complaining about a free app though...

BTW I've been wondering about this -- what's Button 9 for the Blue Angel (the one that's set to "i-mate" function)??

Anyways, I'd bought pocketMax's buttonMax (http://www.pocketmax.net/buttonMax.htm) earlier but am still waiting for the developer to upgrade it to run as a service for better reliability. The problem (as described by them and by other users in their forum) is that PPC Phone Edition devices supposedly have very little processes available, and things tend to get unloaded when many other things are run. Right now for me buttonMax's mapping doesn't get activated automatically after a soft reset, unless I run the program manually first. The developer had guessed that the starter app for the button mapping gets crowded out by all the other processes that run at startup...

I assumed the same type of PPC Phone Edition problem would be present for competing programs (such as VITO's ButtonMapper (http://www.vitotechnology.com/en/products/buttonmapper.html), Orthanc's Double Launcher (http://www.orthancsoftware.com/DLauncher.htm), and a couple of free ones), but I never tried them.


P.S. Also wondering how come it seems difficult for some apps to reprogram the green/red phone buttons on a phone devices (I remember someone had said it was impossible), while this app obviously can do it?

[paris]

nicely done application :) just tried it on my fresh i-mate jam :)
it does add a lot more functionality to buttons and it will be usefull for many xda owners :)

However i have a few comments if the developer is reading this. The setup did not work. my guess is that the cab file is not saved as a cab file but with .tar as an extension. i download the "cab" file only which had a tar extension and renamed it to .cab moved it to my device and i was on :)

quite nifty application however it wont do exactly what i was looking for. What i have in mind is to map the directional pad up,down,left,right to some actions ONLY when in the today screen. this means 4 more buttons just from the dpad. e.g up fies explorer, down fires the contacts, left files the inbox for a quick sms, and right fires the notes for a quick note ;)

try now a few other apps to see if anything can do what i want ;) if you have anything in mind please do save me some time.

[MitchellO]

I went to their site and downloaded the cab directly on my Mini, and had no problems running it on the device.

This programs great, and I can now use this handheld truely one handed!! Almosts beats the treo (if only it had a keyboard!).