Category: Fast Dialer

What is your favourite Fast Dialer theme?

Here’s the new version which includes several significant features. First, the optimization of the app’s operation – it now loads and works faster.

Second – themes. Long awaited, at last implemented. Eight new, nice themes. And still, the app weights ~350k, much less than the competitive apps (at least the ones I’ve heard of). Use the poll on the right side to vote for your favourite.

And the third thing I find important are the images for the different phone types. The labels are small, and it takes a moment to read them. With the images its faster and easier to comprehend which number you received a call from, or which number you’d dial when pressing the call button.

With all these fancy stuff, maybe I should rename the app to Nice dialer 🙂

Just one note: have in mind that the size and the colour of the letters on the dialpad can be changed for all themes equally. Also, the red digits’ background in the “Ms Claire” theme means that the “wildcard mode” search is on (and that is available in all themes too).

The full call log

any chance to have an option to display the full call log in the dialer and not only the dialed numbers? if we can have this also it could replace the complete dialer

This was a common request – with reason. So, here’s version 2.5 which includes the full call log. There are some other improvements too, like using the number field as a call button, and the button to toggle between the call log and the contacts’ list, translation to Arabic etc. Enjoy.

Old school speed dialing

One of the features many people take for granted on a phone is speed dialing (where you long press on a key to dial a favourite contact). Well, the Android development team didn’t find that’s important and never included it. Therefore, all other phone manufacturers who didn’t agree with this thinking developed their own mechanism for speed dialing, each in its own way. (I tried to get an answer from Motorola, for example, how they implement this nice little feature, and got the non-surprising answer that “Right now, there is no open API to modify or use the speed dial information for any 3rd party app.”)

Hence, in order to have speed dial in Fast Dialer, it was necessary to make it separate from the eventual phone’s implementation. Meaning that you set it and use it only in Fast Dialer. But, that’s not bad, I’d say.

Long pressing a contact’s name opens a context menu with the option to “Set Speed Dial” for that contact. Next you choose the number and to which key to map it. Available are the keys from 2 to 9 (as 1 is for voice mail, and 0 is for the + sign). The screen-shot is the screen where one sets the speed dial numbers.

I saw that in other applications there are up to 98 numbers available for speed dial, but I wonder who will remember which contact is on which position if you have 98 positions available 🙂 On the other hand, two digit number speed dialing means typing 2 digits (the second one with a long press), and on Fast Dialer you can find any contact by name by typing 3 digits (for most of the time).

Are you experienced?

As not so rarely, not many people were so thrilled with the thing I was – the senior display mode. They requested at least numbers on the keypad. So, here you are: the newest version 2.3.0 of Fast Dialer has four different display modes: normal, dominant (as in dominant second language), senior and junior (as senior + numbers).

 
 

Other novelties in this release:

  • The long time requested “Sort by family name” – available only on Froyo (and above) devices. Well, android is improving, sorting by family name in 2.2, who knows what sophisticated feature will be available next.
  • Redial. Pressing the hard “Call” key when nothing is typed makes a call to the last dialed number.
  • Preferred phone number by type (for Eclair and above devices, the older have a default number by default)
  • Inverse action – tap on the contact name to make a call, tap in the right corner to open the contact details. People claimed that this would be very useful when “on the go”, so here they are. I don’t agree and stick to the default.
  • Configurable length of the keypad tones.

Enjoy. Here’s a song to go with the Junior display mode:
[youtube w2ci4WAD2zo]

Senior mode

Glad to introduce my favourite new feature: Senior mode. It’s to be found in the “Look and feel” submenu, as it means no change in the functionality, only in the visual aspect of the app.

For me it was always a bit problematic to find my way through the letters, when I was “on the go”. The latest version 2.2.0 provides two solutions for this, one is to set a custom colour for the letters of the second language, which is a very standard way, and the second way is the “Senior mode” which may seem a bit peculiar. It means that the letters of the second language are displayed LARGE, so that they are hard to miss. The numbers are gone, since we all know where they stand – as it is their position that is relevant, not their value. The Latin letters are also gone – since a) many use mostly (or only) the second language, and b) because many know the position of the Latin letters on the dialpad (for example, I wasn’t aware I knew that, until now).

I'm fit for the senior mode, obviously.
The ones that use no second language, the Latin letters will be displayed LARGE in senior mode. Very cool. But, still, I wasn’t brave enough to set this option per default, you should find it in the menu and try it out.

Please note that the functionality remains the same, even when only the second language letters are displayed, the search is by two alphabets, and by numbers, of course.

Another new thing in this release is – apart from several fixes – usage of the hardware call button. Quite strange that not until several people on the 4PDA.ru forum requested this feature, did I realize that this button could be used for more than just starting the app… So now, when your search yields only one result, pressing the hard call button will call that contact. Otherwise, the number in the dial field will be dialed.

You know you have a good app when people are seeking to crack it

And the award offered is 50 times the price of the app. One of the biggest compliments I received for the Fast Dialer.

Good luck people 🙂 If I have to change something around the registration procedure, it means they made it. Good to have someone to blame.
http://forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=445&t=151228

P.S. It’s not me, nor someone I know 🙂

Fast Dialer v.2 – Some meaningful colours

Options for contacts / results sorting. Time of last call.What’s in version 2?
Everything that was in version 1, plus some new features. Its good to mention that the basis of the app remains the same, so it won’t lose on performance because of the enhancements, which is, unfortunately, not always the case with our favourite programs.

And what’s new?
Contact sorting. It used to be alphabetical only, by name, but now you can choose to sort by preference (i.e. how often you contact a person), or by the time of the last call – which is now the default sorting, since I find it the most meaningful of all.

Time of last call. Always displayed for each contact (where it’s missing – no calls have been logged for that person).

Red is for wildcard search modeWildcard search mode
Long pressing the star (*) button turns on the wildcard search mode. The number field turns red (sort-of red) to make this obvious. The typed * is a wildcard for any combination of characters, digits etc. within the name / company.

What good is this for? Let’s say you have several contacts whose name is Ian, and you want to dial the one that works for Intel. You start to type 426 (for Ian) and you may end up seeing something like:

Ian Christopherson
Ian John Boose
Ian Van Der Saar (Motorola)
Ian Gillan (DP)
...
Ian J. Christopherson (Intel)

So, to speed up the search, long press the *, and afterwards type 46 (for In…) and voilà – you found the Ian you wanted to dial.

Search all numbers mode.Blue is for search all numbers mode
Long pressing the number sign (#) makes the number field turn blue, which means the search all numbers mode is on. Since normally the Fast Dialer searches only through the default numbers, this is useful if you want to dig out another number.

I must admit that I intended version 2 to include an option to always “search through all fields”, as well as other things, but I still haven’t found the time to start working on that. So, this is only a step in that direction. Nevertheless, I think this is a useful improvement which will make the user experience even better, as well as cover even more search scenarios.

By the way, there is an option to display the starred contacts in a different colour, in the default case – yellow.

Someone may note that this was too much explanation for obvious things, which may be true, but since there is no explanation available in the app itself, I just want to make sure people will understand correctly what the app does and what it doesn’t do.

Claim your phone back

The smart phones of today made us slightly forget about the main purpose of the phone – making calls. We have accommodated to other “extra features” and traded a bit of the essential phone functionality for things which we actually may not need so much.

I am biased, but with the Fast Dialer app, I recovered the feeling of the phone in my pocket. I can find and dial (or text) the person I want in no time.  That’s why it’s the only thing I need on the home screen.

Actually, I don’t find that Fast Dialer does something so great, but it simply works as every dialer should, as we all expect it to work. As someone complimented the app recently: it searches normally, not as the other android dialers.