Push Your Buttons

My biggest complaint about stepping over to the Fuze from the original Tilt was the loss of all those buttons. I liked those buttons. Damnit. Don’t get me started. Have you heard of AEButton? Well it’s a hard button mapper (hard meaning the buttons you can feel on the phone, not buttons to press on the screen, mapping meaning you can tell that button to do something you specify) that’s been around for a while, and I appreciated having had it. The thing is it hits you with a splash screen on boot which I could do without, on some roms it randomly stops working or only works on some buttons and in recent 6.5.5 builds that I’ve used it doesn’t appear to work at all. Not to mention they’ve got a .ru domain …. j/k! Nothing wrong with that. But still.

Not a problem because my main man tarkim hooked us up with Keyboard Controller. “What is it?” tarkim asks himself rhetorically. “It’s a modified keyboard driver with configurator application for keys setup. Any key (yeah, I mean ANY, including Home and Back keys) can be reassigned to perform any desired actions.” So you can assign the volume up button, for instance, to make the volume go up on a single click like it normally does if you love manipulating the volume frequently, to start up Google Maps on a double click, to fire up your RSS reader on a triple click and the camera on a long press, but for any button on the phone including the mute button on the back of the Tilt 2. That should be enough to cover you for all of the programs you regularly use, otherwise you are what they call a power user. And it doesn’t even drop anything in your StartUp folder. That pleases me.

Its configuration interface ain’t winning any beauty contests but if you can’t figure it out, c’mon man step your game up. This is Windows Mobile Phone baby, you’re in the big leagues now. Here are his threads for the Fuze / Touch Pro, the Tilt 2/ Touch Pro2, and the Pure / Touch Diamond2. Note those are unique threads with unique versions for each phone so I encourage you not to click the wrong link. They should work for all carriers’ versions of each phone, and only each of the phones I listed, GSM and CDMA alike.

Doug Simmons

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