Tag: senior

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.