SPB Mobile Shell

matthewrleech wrote:Does anybody know how to enable the 3D carousel reflections or how to tilt the carousel angle, as shown on the SPB website?

yeah .. the satio does this .. its a pretty gimmick ..

angiepea wrote:Just seen these discount code links on another website, thought someone might find them useful for a good discount on spb shell, i think they are well within their expiry date

Thanks to Shaunuk from Dailymobile forum

"Hi All,
I have just purchased SPB Mobile Shell from Handango UK (http://www.handango.co.uk)
The Coupon 2525 got me %25 off so I payed �18.74 instead of �24.99

Don't know how long the offer is valid so if your thinking of going the SPB shell way this may help with the decision.

Surfing around I also found coupon SURVEY25 (%25 off) at http://www.mycoupons.com/coupons/handango.com valid to 7/10/10 which may work at http://www.handango.com for those working in dollars."

By it from the US site with the code and its yours for �15ish.

Looks good on the X6 too.

Angie/Iron it seems to be your posts with the links that get sucked up by spam filter. Am keeping an eye on them

OK, I have installed this and it looks nice but will take a bit of getting used to.

How do I reclaim ram as others have done?

dog-man

I downloaded a trial last night for my Satio. I get the 3D carousel thing and it works well in it, no lag. I still have ~140 MB of free RAM as well, so no problems running other apps. That's with the Sony Ericsson standby theme switched off in the Symbian settings mind you - it's flash based and takes at least 10 MB of RAM itself.

I'm kind of not sure what I think about Mobile Shell. It's definitely fancier, it has lots of nice effects and I like the fanciness of the 3D carousel. But, I'm not convinced that it makes usability any better. In the end, I mostly had it setup to have all my icons on different screens that I could swipe between, which isn't really all that different from having different folders on my Symbian menu with different icons.

I'll play around with it a bit more though.

kontraband wrote:
Angie/Iron it seems to be your posts with the links that get sucked up by spam filter. Am keeping an eye on them

Thanks kontraband!

dog-man wrote:OK, I have installed this and it looks nice but will take a bit of getting used to.

How do I reclaim ram as others have done?

dog-man

I've had it for almost a month now and I'm still getting used to it....

I constantly find myself changing screens and shortcuts around.

Initially I set up SPB Mobile Shell to look like, and behave like, the N97's home screen but as I have been using it I find different shortcuts and layouts suit me better.

I have lost count of the number of times I've changed things, saved my settings and then started tweaking those settings immediately. Not too mention the "modding" I've been doing to it.

As for RAM, I took angiepea's advice and completely emptied everything possible from the N97's built-in home screen, NewsBuzz, AccuWeather, ComingNext and 2 shortcut bars. This saved me about 10MB of RAM.

The original release of SPB Mobile Shell, build 295, was a bit RAM thirsty to say the least. I would say around 20-25MB.

However, subsequent beta versions and their latest release, v3.5.5 build 349, have shaved about 10MB from this. Bear in mind that you do not need things like the built-in Contacts, Logs, Calendar, etc. open for Shell to function.

What this means in practice for me is that by installing SPB Shell I'm using about 5MB of RAM more than with the built-in home screen I was using.

For that 5MB I get a very fast, customizable, good looking, 5 or 10 home screens that do not, as in the built-in home screen, close down all my widgets every time I run low on RAM.

I used to get fed up and embarrassed with my 3 "live" home screen widgets going blank and saying "Loading..." every time I got low on RAM.

Of the widgets I used to use, Accuweather has been replaced by Shell's own weather which not only shows on any home screen of your choosing, as a widget, but also has 2 pages of info in the carousel. ComingNext for forthcoming diary appointments (a very good free app by the way) has been replaced with Agenda on Shell which offers me a number of widget views as well as a page on the carousel.

The tough one to replace for me was one of the 3 news widgets I used to use on the built in home screen. All of these allowed me to see the news headlines and with one tap would open up with more information. Unfortunately, there is at the moment, no equivalent in Shell. although it is possible to install any of those widgets on the built-in screen and just place an icon on the Shell's screen. Whilst it does not offer "at a glance" news headlines, it does mean that you can tap on the widget icon and open the full page. Personally, I haven't bothered with this.

SPB Shell for symbian is still evolving at a high rate of knots, (4 beta test versions in less than a month) and I fully expect more features in the near future from them.

As you can see from the attached screen shot, I am booting up at about 39MB of RAM whilst running FreeiSMS and Nokia Email.

Realistically, in general use, I would expect to be around 25MB of RAM in the course of a day because I find that Shell is very good at returning RAM, much better than Nokia's own UI.

Iron Ass

Where did you get that background from?

Looks pretty good!

TurtlePower wrote:Iron Ass

Where did you get that background from?

Looks pretty good!

It looks really good when used in conjunction with SPB Shell.

My screenshots don't really do it justice.

It's Pizero's, Pulsar theme with Zeta icons used in the Professional layout of SPB Mobile Shell.

Available here:-

http://www.pizero.net/premium/?p=541

Alternatively, you could just use the Pulsar wallpaper in SPB Shell's, "Lifestyle" mode.

Ironass

Thanks for the pointer :icon14:

Wow! I go away for a bit and come back to this joyous piece of software!! It really is a game changer!

However, I have a question. Is the registration of this app locked to an IMEI number?

The reason I ask is that I'm going to be running a new X6 next to my N97 for a bit and once I eventually move over to the X6 completely, I'd want to move this app too.

Any pointers?

TIA 😊

the SPBShell site say basically its tied to that IMEI... so youre stuck with getting a new one. 😞

Still, doesnt hurt to ask

ironass, thanks for the cool tips on SPB, kudos or rather rep +1 for you 😉

kontraband wrote:
ironass, thanks for the cool tips on SPB, kudos or rather rep +1 for you 😉

Hey! great!

Thanks for that kontraband.

:hahaha: OK... you're definitely on for a Christmas drink this year, so long as you don't suck me up again (in the spam/obscenity filter).

Has anyone had a problem where the screen is completely unresponsive when you open up another app with SPB Mobile Shell running? It seems to happen to me frequently and I have to restart to get it to work again.

It seems like a RAM issue. I don't get the problem for a while after reboot but when it does, anything else I open like Web, Gravity, or even just a little widget, open successfully but immediately stop responding.

SPB Mobile Shell runs just fine though.

zxon wrote:

It seems like a RAM issue.

Upon boot up my N97 has about 60MB of RAM available. Looking further clock, messaging, contacts & log is running. If I close these using Handy Taskman I gain 2MB RAM. But after doing some browsing, e-mails, SMS, calls etc, the available RAM does decrease even with no application runnning. I use Taskman to check. The available RAM can go as low as 48MB at times. So what has happened to the RAM. The only way to gain it back is to re-boot and start the cycle again. I think it is some issue with the handling of RAM with the OS.

I am tempted to get SPB shell but will use the trail version first.

When selecting favourite contacts I selected one by mistake and cannot find anyway to remove it now.

Looks like I will have to completely uninstall this and start again unless anyone here knows better?

dog-man

dog-man wrote:When selecting favourite contacts I selected one by mistake and cannot find anyway to remove it now.

Looks like I will have to completely uninstall this and start again unless anyone here knows better?

dog-man

Do behave dog man!

To remove a contact from Favourite Contacts on SPB Shell, just press and hold the contacts photo or entry for 2 seconds and you are presented with a pop-up menu that allows you to "Change contact".

or you could try uninstalling the whole thing and re-installing it which wouldn't change anything. 😃

Thanks.

I was hoping it would be simple. 😃

dog-man

lol...

Should have kept my mouth shut shouldn't I?

Would have given dog man something to do instead of watching the World Cup, Wimbledon and Big Brother over the weekend. :hmmmm:

ironass wrote:Should have kept my mouth shut shouldn't I?

Would have given dog man something to do instead of watching the World Cup, Wimbledon and Big Brother over the weekend. :hmmmm:

you left out Top Gear!! 😃

zxon wrote:Has anyone had a problem where the screen is completely unresponsive when you open up another app with SPB Mobile Shell running? It seems to happen to me frequently and I have to restart to get it to work again.

It seems like a RAM issue. I don't get the problem for a while after reboot but when it does, anything else I open like Web, Gravity, or even just a little widget, open successfully but immediately stop responding.

SPB Mobile Shell runs just fine though.

So no one else is experiencing this problem?

zxon wrote:So no one else is experiencing this problem?

Nope, not had that problem here.

zxon wrote:Has anyone had a problem where the screen is completely unresponsive when you open up another app with SPB Mobile Shell running? It seems to happen to me frequently and I have to restart to get it to work again.

It seems like a RAM issue. I don't get the problem for a while after reboot but when it does, anything else I open like Web, Gravity, or even just a little widget, open successfully but immediately stop responding.

SPB Mobile Shell runs just fine though.

I once noticed that while in SPB Shell I couldn't switch apps while Maps was running until I pressed the Maps options button which probably took some load off the cpu. This was an earlier version of Shell and I have not had this problem with 3.5.5.

3.5.5 has been very good. After boot, Shell startup, Free-iSMS startup and three RSS widgets on the original homescreen I have 38MB free. Maps reduces that to 21MB and finally Profimail leaves me with 18MB.

Quite useable.

I've sent a quick feature request to SPB for Mobile Shell:

� Removal of Lifestyle wallpaper (so that the active theme's backdrop shows through)
� Free memory display in task switcher
� RSS Widgets (that auto-update...obviously) with configurable number of headlines
� Left/Right desktop wrap-around

No doubt all of those will be in the next beta 😉

I am impressed with the SPB Shell. I normally change the profile of my N97 to meet the situation. I use Silent or Meeting but the selected profile is not displayed in the SPB Shell screen unlike the normal N97. Is there any way of displaying it so that I am aware of the active profile. Thanks.

ajeet wrote:I am impressed with the SPB Shell. I normally change the profile of my N97 to meet the situation. I use Silent or Meeting but the selected profile is not displayed in the SPB Shell screen unlike the normal N97. Is there any way of displaying it so that I am aware of the active profile. Thanks.

The Profile icon displayed for Silent differs from that displayed for Meeting .. so if you familiarise yourself with these two icons you should be able to tell what profile you have loaded "at a glance".

HTH

matthewrleech wrote:I've sent a quick feature request to SPB for Mobile Shell:

� Removal of Lifestyle wallpaper (so that the active theme's backdrop shows through)
� Free memory display in task switcher
� RSS Widgets (that auto-update...obviously) with configurable number of headlines
� Left/Right desktop wrap-around

No doubt all of those will be in the next beta 😉

Matthew, if you set up "professional" as your primary set of homescreens then you don't have to use a wallpaper and will see only your theme backdrop 😊

it means switching everything around, but it only took me 5 mins

seki wrote:The Profile icon displayed for Silent differs from that displayed for Meeting .. so if you familiarise yourself with these two icons you should be able to tell what profile you have loaded "at a glance".

HTH

Thanks seki. I did not use the SPB Mobile's profile icon.

I must say WOW! This app made me save money and not get the new iPhone 4. It takes up RAM, but the UI is a lot more responsive than the default UI and it has all the widgets I need. It made overall N97 much more enjoyable. Now I just don't have a reason to get the new iPhone!

Isn't it PATHETIC that a 3d party software can make a way nicer, more responsive and more functional UI than the default built-in and "optimized" UI by Nokia?

MonarchX wrote:

Isn't it PATHETIC that a 3d party software can make a way nicer, more responsive and more functional UI than the default built-in and "optimized" UI by Nokia?

Its amazing how many people have said just that..Nokia have lost me as a customer for ever.