Tip: Freeing Up Hardware Buttons

Originally published as “Monday Methodology: Freeing Up Hardware Buttons” on 22 Oct 2006.

The Palm comes with the hardware buttons preprogrammed. On the Zire 72 models, there are four hardware buttons: Calendar, Photo, Contacts, Music.

Agendus allows one to set up a cycling button. What this means is you can set up Agendus to cycle through any selected views in Agendus by pressing the same button. This can be found in the Launch and Buttons section of the preferences. By setting up Agendus this way, I can free up one of my hardware buttons and reassign it to another application.

I also use another application that “doubles” a hardware button. Slap allows me to set a second application to launch when I push the button that launches Slap a second time.