Since get­ting a Touch Pro a cou­ple weeks ago, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out to best to opti­mize the Touch­Flo inter­face. HTC has done some nice things with this device (the Touch Pro on Sprint or out­side the US, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, as well as all the vari­ants of HTC Dia­mond), and in a lot of ways they’ve brought the ease of use from Win­dows Mobile Standard’s slid­ing pan­els home screen and sim­ple Home and Back but­tons to Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional. It’s nice, but there’s one prob­lem. By default, the Start Menu is still up there in the upper left cor­ner, poten­tially con­fus­ing mat­ters by offer­ing a com­pletely dif­fer­ent and con­tra­dic­tory way to launch pro­grams and access sys­tem set­tings. For­tu­nately, you can get rid of it, sim­plify the user inter­face and get a nifty way to switch between run­ning pro­grams in the process. (While one of Win­dows Mobile’s strengths is that there’s more than one way to do almost every­thing, a design goal for an effi­cient user inter­face is to have as lit­tle over­lap in func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble; a place for every­thing and every­thing in its place.)

WkTask is a free shell util­ity that par­tially replaces your Win­dows Mobile Pro taskbar. By default, it leaves the Start Menu and noti­fi­ca­tion icons alone, and puts icons for your run­ning pro­grams where the win­dow title would nor­mally be. But for our pur­poses, since Touch­Flo 3D (or 2D, if you’re using an older device and can remap the Win­dows but­ton on the phone to show the Today screen instead of the Start Menu) dupli­cates and expands on the Start Menu func­tion­al­ity, we’re going to get rid of it.

In the set­tings, notice that the off­set from the left edge is set to 0 pix­els. This moves the run­ning pro­grams all the way to left, cov­er­ing the Start Menu com­pletely. With the clock changed to the ana­log clock (you have a huge dig­i­tal one on your home screen any­way), this also gives the entire taskbar a nice “all icons” uni­for­mity fit­ting to a phone user expe­ri­ence. You can enhance this effect by telling WkTask to dis­play only task icons in the Design tab of WkTask preferences.

So how can you use a Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional device with out ever touch­ing the Start Menu? Pretty eas­ily, as it turns out. Here’s how it breaks down.

There are a cou­ple of gotchas. For one, you’ll notice the run­ning apps area, from pix­els 0 to 225 on a VGA screen, com­pletely cov­ers the noti­fi­ca­tion icon if you have Blue­tooth turned on as well. I get around this by mak­ing sure all the noti­fi­ca­tions I have enabled dis­play a mes­sage onscreen in Win­dows Mobile’s love-​it-​or-​hate-​it pop up “toast”. That way I don’t have to tap the now-​hidden noti­fi­ca­tion icon in the taskbar to get clear an alarm. Also, on my screen I only have room to dis­play 5 run­ning tasks at a time. I can run more than that, but when I do, the fifth icon is replaced by a dou­ble right chevron ( » ) and the rest are dis­played in a lit­tle drop down menu.

Over­all, though, this has greatly improved my ease of use on the device, mak­ing it easy to switch between apps with­out going to the home screen, and mak­ing the home screen the one and only way to launch appli­ca­tions. This dra­mat­i­cally cuts down on con­fu­sion when it comes time to do some­thing, and makes Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional feel more like Win­dows Mobile Stan­dard; that is, makes it feel more like a phone. Give it a try and let me know how it works in the comments.

A funny thing hap­pened on the way to the blog this morn­ing. I checked my email, caught up my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and scanned last night’s Twit­ter activ­ity in Tweet­Deck (which is so good it’s actu­ally worth installing Adobe Air, thanks Alli). And I real­ized I didn’t have Google Reader or Live Mes­sen­ger open. That I haven’t had them open for some time now. And that I don’t really use them any­more. Every­one I talk to on a reg­u­lar basis is on Twitter.

This may be not restricted to Twit­ter and more a func­tion of social net­works in gen­eral, but I’m far more active on Twit­ter than I am on Face­book, MySpace or LinkedIn (though I’m try­ing to grok Face­book). But I’ve noticed that since I started using Twit­ter and fol­low­ing every­one I know or am inter­ested in, my instant mes­sag­ing use has dropped through the floor and even my text mes­sage use has dropped off sharply. If I want to get someone’s atten­tion and it’s not worth an email, I’ll tweet. If it’s pri­vate, I’ll send a Twit­ter Direct Mes­sage. I’ve got twit­ter clients on all my com­put­ers, includ­ing my smart­phone (TweekDeck on desk­top and net­book, Tiny Twit­ter on the Touch Pro, though I tend to waf­fle between TT and ceTwit and Pock­eTwit), and even use the Twit­ter web site when I’m at the office behind our proxy. It’s become my pre­ferred method for light not-​in-​person (out-​person?) conversation.

Do you tweet? And if so, has it replaced IM for you?