My Review of Butler
One of the true must-have applications for any Treo owner is Hobbyist' Butler. This suite of handy software utilities, packaged in a small footprint (totaling about 200 KB) single application, offers a real "Swiss army knife" of all things Palm should have, but unfortunately did not, bundle with its smartphone devices.
Among the rich features offered by Butler: sophisticated alarm setting and handling, management of system notifications (such as missed incoming calls, SMS and voicemail), better use and control of the phone led (e.g. turning it completely off at night, and using it to indicate missed system notifications), nifty additions to built-in button features (such as extending the one-key-press application launch feature to work outside the phone application or the ability to use the side volume keys to quickly switch to a previous application or scroll up and down inside a document) and advanced security features (including the ability to remotely lock or wipe the memory of your phone by sending a password identified special SMS). The variety of features can totally change your user experience, leaving you wondering how could you have managed your daily life without it.
Though a thorough discussion of the various features is beyond the scope of this short post, I would like to elaborate a bit about two of the features, which make Butler for me a real "killing application": the handling of alarms and that of system notifications.
Butler' alarms is a sophisticated feature, in par with dedicated alarm applications. Not only does it offer the setting of multiple daily alarms, each of which with its own setting of volume, repetition frequency and interval, and such additional attention-grabbers as flashing screen, graduate volume increase, led blinking and vibration, but you can also choose from the built-in midi ringtones or the a use an external MP3 player to play your favorite tune. In addition, you can customize the alarm message and event have your choice of application launched as soon as the alarm is clear (which might be great for, example, to easily view today's schedule, or the expected weather…).
Notification handling or the "attention grabber" as it is called in Butler, is really something I cannot understand how Palm has failed to bundle with the Treo. The idea is simple – whenever you miss some system notification, such as a phone call missed while you where out of the room, Butler is there to ensure you would not fail to notice it. Thus, for example, you can make butler set the led to orange color in such cases (which is super handy in noisy environment as a simple peek at the phone, without turning the screen on, would reveal that you have missed a call/alarm/etc.), or ask that a short beep alarm would sound every five minutes to remind you of the need to attend the notification. In addition, and to avoid waking out at night due to some stupid missed SMS, you can also tell Butler not to nag you during such and such hours.
More than its diverse collection of great tools, Butler is worthy of high commendation for its attention to the smallest details. Thus, for example, if you set an alarm while your ringer is switched to silence, you would get a warning message (which has saved me time and again from missing my alarms). Similarly, great attention and effort has been put into squeezing out the most of each of the various Treo models. Thus, for example, Treo 600 owners are offered a way to compensate for the lack of a built-in message privacy feature which prevents SMS messages from being immediately displayed, while owners of newer Treo models have some additional features available for manipulating the red and green phone hard buttons.
All in all Butler is a very professional, highly polished application, which I would personally recommend as a first choice for any Treo owner.
Highly recommended.
Hugs, Maya.
