Review of SBSH Facade - THE WM Home Screen Plugin

Following up on the heels of my quick post about SBSH’s Papyrus program comes a review of their Facade Home Screen Plugin.  It is made for Smartphones and is also completely compatible with lanscape/widescreen phones like the Motorola Q.

It allows a home screen view into your calendar and tasks data with a tabbed model.  You can set up the tabbed portion to have as many tabs as will fit.  Tab types include calendar, tasks, and launcher.  I prefer to use Facade’s capability to have a non tabbed launcher bar instead.  It integrates right into Papyrus, allowing you to launch it from your home screen.

It’s customizablity is endless.  You can have custom icons for launcher items and for the tabsa.  You can also control everything from font weight to font size, to color, to blends, and so on and so forth.

I’ll walk you through a quick screensnap of my home page to highlight a few details visually.

You can see a couple custom icons in my launcher bar (the yodlee and grandcentral ones which I have set to launch the respective mobile versions of those sites.)

Next are the custom transparent tab icons that are part of the clarity facade theme (I have a widescreen phone, and the theme is for regular aspect ration ones, so I couldn’t use the stock version.)

Under those tab icons you’ll see the data view where my tasks (the currently selected tab) are shown in line.

For now I’ll skip the other tweaks that don’t relate to Facade (my email tracker, the twitter hack, and smart monitor icons)

One thing for those creating their own icons to remember is to use true green (#00ff00) for the transparent areas, and to save the graphic out as a 22×22 icon (44×44 if you use the granny-vision large icons) png file.

Facade costs only $14.95, or $9.95 with their forum member discount.  Buy it along with Papyrus and save even more, netting both for $19.90, $5 less than Pocket Informant by WebIS alone!

If you are dying to have a view into your calendar and/or tasks data on the home screen of your phone that is customizable to you, then this is a no brainer.  Heck, I’d buy it for the launch bar functionality alone!
[tags]WebIS, SBSH, Facade, Papyrus, Pocket Informant, WM5, Smartphone, Home Screen, Plugin, calendar, tasks, launchbar[/tags]