Symbian in Motion

Tips & Tricks: Using Best Profiles as an App-Launcher

Mobile Task by Odendahl SEPT-Solutions has the potential to be a very useful application but it doesn’t perform a few essential functions that would make it useful. You cannot create a schedule that will launch and then kill an application on a daily basis at preset times. Mobile Task is great for one-off app launches at a predetermined time, but I personally have no need for such an app. It has also been available for quite a while now so I’m not sure when and if it will ever be updated.

That brings me to my latest Tips & Tricks entry. Beyond managing your profiles schedule, Best Profiles by SmartphoneWare can also be used as a fully functional schedule-based app launcher/killer! Many of you probably know this already but how many people are currently using it to its full potential?

Here’s an example: Let’s say that every Monday you want your General profile active all day long. During the day there are several apps that you use at around the same time every Monday - for example you use Handy Weather to check your local weather around 7:30am before you leave your house. Why not automate that process and let your phone do the work for you? Best Profiles can be configured to launch Handy Weather every Monday at 7:30am, and even play a chime when it does to remind you to check the weather! Then you can use the app to your liking and close it when you’re done, or configure Best Profiles to close it for you after 15 minutes (or any other duration). The following is another example with details and pictures to guide you through the process of setting it up:

In this example, let’s say that you want to launch ProfiMail by Lonely Cat Games each weekday when you leave work at 5:00pm and then close it when you go to sleep at 11:30pm. When you leave the house for work each day at 8:00am however, Best Profiles activates your General profile for the day and you don’t want ProfiMail launched at that time so you cannot set it to launch with the General profile.

Well the first step in this case is to create a ‘copy’ of the General profile with the exact same settings but a different name. To do this, simply go to Tools -> Profiles and then hit Options -> Create new. Now adjust the profile settings so that they match your General profile and then give the new profile a logical name. In this case I called my new profile “Enable ProfiMail” because that’s what it will do. :)

Now that you have your new profile, it’s time to configure Best Profiles to work its magic. Open Best Profiles and choose Options -> Advanced Settings. Now click over to the new profile you just created, scroll to Run Applications, and click on it with the center joystick/D-pad key.

Now choose Options -> New entry. In the Application field on the next screen, scroll to the app that you want to be launched when this profile is enabled. In this case you also want ProfiMail to be killed when you go to sleep (which is also when Best Profiles will change your profile again) so choose Kill application in the next field as seen below.

Now just click OK and you will see ProfiMail listed in the Run Application field. All you have left to do is add your new ‘Enable ProfiMail’ profile to your scheduling as you would with any other profile (Options -> Profile rules -> Schedule, and create a new item Mon-Fri at 5:00pm).

The possibilities really are endless. This functionality can be used with calendar events and charger setting as well. In addition, you can set a profile to launch/kill multiple apps at once if there is more than one app you want to run at a particular time. Sit down and think about the different ways that you might use this functionality and I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty of things that I haven’t even thought of!

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