"How to" in Propel

[sterrell]

Is anyone out there using Propel quite a bit? I am curious about:
1. the 'shortcut' feature. What does it do and how does it work?
2. sending apps to the card...What kind of gain is that in terms of RAM and speed on the device?

[Confused Vorlon]

I'll answer backwards:
2) this saves ram which may help if you are running out of ram to store stuff. Unlike a PC, freeing up some ram won't really help speed. Ram in the treo is more like the hard drive on a pc.
You will see one speed impact though - to run the app propel actually has to copy it back to ram, run it and then delete it afterwards, so that does take a noticeable ammount of time.

-conclusion: some speed loss, but useful if you have limited ram

1) one disadvantage of moving an app to ram is that some other apps might have preferences to launch apps from ram (e.g. the butler alarm can go off, then launch the app of your choice). These apps won't see apps on the sd card - but they will see shortcuts. The shortcut is just a tiny app that essentially calls propel and says 'please launch x from the sd card'

also - as propel launches much more than just apps, you can create a shortcut that for example launches an mp3 or a picture of your kids. Then you can use the shortcut in something like the favourites panel on your treo so that a quickkey can bring up that mp3/picture.

[sterrell]

Alrightythen. That confirms my suspicions.