This is a copy of the Getting Started text document that is automatically loaded on to each new installation of Folderway. You can read along with the instructions below to familiarize yourself with the functionality of Folderway.

INTRODUCTION

Congratulations. To be viewing this text file you must have tapped on the Welcome folder of Folderway’s main screen (called Launchpad) and then, when the Welcome folder opened, you tapped on the Getting Started text document icon and this text file appeared. Not too difficult, was it! Hopefully you will find the rest of the system as easy to use but to help you along we are going to give you a few pointers that might be of assistance. Let’s start with the screen you are currently looking at.

At the very top of the screen you will see the standard Android(tm) status information bar. Below that is Folderway’s app bar. At the left of the app bar is a left pointing angle bracket (<) followed by Folderway’s logo and the title of the item you are currently viewing (Getting Started). Tapping any of these will take you back to the previous screen – the contents of the Welcome folder in this case.

After the item name, and depending on the size and rotation of your Android device’s screen, there will probably be one or more icons indicating actions you can perform. On the particular device we are looking at here at Folderway, we can see a pencil and a rectangular map. To find out what these icons will do (without actually doing it) just long press on one of them and a short description will appear.

At the right hand side of the app bar, again depending upon your particular screen size and rotation, you will probably see three vertical dots. This is Android’s ‘overflow’ menu. Any options that couldn’t fit on the app bar as icons will be in this overflow menu. Just tap on the three vertical dots to see what other options are available.

Below the app bar is the main body of the screen which, in this instance, is showing you the text of the Getting Started text document.

At the bottom of the screen (or right hand side if your screen is currently in landscape mode) you will see Android’s three usual Back, Home and Recent buttons. These buttons work as expected with the Back button having exactly the same effect as tapping our logo at the top of the screen as we discussed above.

Before we leave this screen, since we are looking at a text document, you can long press or double tap on a piece of text and that text will be highlighted and our app bar replaced with the clipboard bar that allows you to copy the highlighted text for pasting elsewhere. To remove the clipboard bar and reinstate our app bar, simply tap somewhere else in the body of this text.

Our next step is to leave this document and return to the Welcome folder. This is going to make it rather difficult for you to follow along with the remainder of this document unless you are a fast reader with an exceptional memory! Fortunately, we hold a copy of this document on our web site at http://www.folderway.com as the Getting Started page.

Either tap on Android’s Back button, or on our logo near the top of the screen to exit this text document.

FOLDERS

You should now be looking at the contents of the Welcome folder which, at the moment, consists of just the Getting Started text document. You can see from the icons and overflow menu that you can take photographs and videos to be stored in this folder. You can also create text notes in the folder and make audio recordings. Note that one of the options allows you to create sub-folders within this folder. Folderway imposes no limit on how deep you nest sub-folders within sub-folders etc.

Below our app bar, you now see an extra ‘breadcrumb trail’ of parent folders of the current folder. In this instance, the Welcome folder is a main folder rather than a sub-folder and so the only thing ‘up’ from the Welcome folder is the main Launchpad screen. The parent folder navigation bar therefore only shows one item: Launchpad. If you deeply nest sub-folders then this parent navigation bar (which will scroll horizontally when there are many parents to display) allows you to quickly jump ‘up’ the hierarchy.

You can switch the parent navigation bar off using the Settings option of the Launchpad screen, if you wish. In such cases you will have to step up through the hierarchy of parent folders using the Back button.

Another new thing that we can see on this Welcome folder display is a line of five ‘blobs’ near the bottom of the screen. The first blob is solid orange and the remaining four are hollow white blobs. This is known as the fast-paging bar. When you have a lot of items within a folder (and Folderway imposes no limit on how many you can have) it can be tedious to scroll left and right to get from near the start to near the end or vice versa. You could always use the Search option (in the overflow menu) but this will search for the item name you give it not only in the current folder, but in it’s sub-folders as well.

When you have less than five ‘pages’ of items, some of the blobs of the fast paging bar will he hollow. When you have exactly five pages of items, all of the blobs will be solid with the current page being orange. When you have more than five pages of items then the blobs will take you a percentage of the way through the pages as appropriate.

You can switch the fast-paging bar off using the Settings option of the Launchpad screen, if you wish. Happy scrolling!

Enough of navigation aids. What else can we do within the Welcome folder? Try a long press on the Getting Started text document icon. A context menu will appear showing what you can do with this item. The options include renaming the item, moving it to some other folder (once you have another folder!), copying it to another folder, duplicating it within the current folder and deleting it.

Although you don’t have any other folders yet, you can similarly rename, move and delete folders just as if they were simple items. Be careful about deleting folders since the delete operation will include deleting all of the folder’s contents, including sub-folders and their contents as well.

To remove the context menu from the screen, tap the Back button.

Let’s leave the Welcome folder for the moment and return to the Launchpad screen by tapping either the Back button or the Folderway icon.

LAUNCHPAD

You should now be looking at Folderway’s main screen, called Launchpad. You will probably notice that the Launchpad has a new section called Recent Items that you have not seen before. Tapping on one of these items takes you immediately to view the chosen item. Try long pressing on a recent item to see what operations you can perform.

You can long press on main folders also but if you long press on the Welcome folder you will see something strange. Previously we said you could move and delete folders just as if they were ordinary items – but there are no Move or Delete options for the Welcome folder in its pop up menu. What’s going on?

The main method of using Folderway is to navigate to the folder where you wish to create a new item such as a photo or text note etc. You then create the new item, giving it a meaningful name, and it is automatically placed in the current folder. Sometimes, however, you need to create a new item RIGHT NOW. If you are on the Launchpad screen and need to take a photo immediately, you can do so by tapping on the camera option and simply taking your photo. When you have taken the photo and confirmed it’s what you want, Folderway will automatically put it in the Welcome folder. It won’t even ask you to name it just in case you want to take another photograph straight away. The name that Folderway gives to the photo will be of the ‘Android Gallery’ style which is to say it’s a representation of the date and time the photo was taken.

At a later time you can return to the Welcome folder, long press on the photo and rename it to something more meaningful and then move it to whatever folder you wish. Because Folderway uses the Welcome folder in this special way, you are not allowed to delete it or to make it a sub-folder of some other folder. What you can do, however, (and which we recommend) is to rename the Welcome folder to something like “New stuff”, “Ad hoc” or “Not filed yet”.

One useful facility on the Launchpad screen is the search facility. It was felt to be sufficiently useful that we made it the very first option. When you search from the Launchpad screen, Folderway will match against the names of all items within the system. The matching is against all or part of the item’s name and is case insensitive. It’s a quick way to find things you’ve misplaced.

The Launchpad screen has a number of other interesting options allowing you to do such things as test location tracking, altering settings, creating and restoring local backups and so forth. The question of securing the data held by Folderway is dealt with at some length next.

DATA SAFETY

Your data being held by Folderway is important and needs to be secured against loss. Two methods are available to you, each with its pros and cons, and you can choose to enable either or both of these facilities using the Settings option from the menu on the Launchpad screen.

Local Backup

By default, a backup is scheduled to run at 4:00 AM each day. This method of securing your data creates a ZIP file, called folderway.zip, in the Folderway_Zipped directory of your device’s external storage (SD card). This is a heavy process which is why it should be scheduled for when you are unlikely to be actively using your Android device. In addition to any automatic backup, you can create a backup manually at any time by using the Local Backup menu option of the Launchpad screen. The pros and cons of using the Local Backup facility are as follow:

Pro – it is a complete copy of all your data held within the Folderway system, including the database and your preference settings.

Pro – it is fast to restore from a local backup since no Internet traffic is involved.

Con – it can use up quite a lot of space on your external storage since it is a complete copy – albeit in compressed format.

Con – you have to manually copy the folderway.zip file from the Folderway_Zipped directory on your device’s external storage to your PC or Mac for complete security.

Dropbox Syncing

This option is not enabled by default since it requires you to have a Dropbox account. When enabled, this facility will use a special area reserved for apps within your Dropbox storage. The pros and cons of using Dropbox Syncing are as follows:

Pro – You do not have to manually copy any files yourself; Dropbox will do it all for you by copying changes up to their secure servers.

Pro – If you link another Android device with the Folderway app on it to Dropbox using the same Dropbox account, the Folderway system will automatically sync your data (optionally including your preference settings) between the devices. Use a separate Dropbox account if you want your data to be held on a Dropbox server but don’t want to sync your data between devices.

Con – You need to monitor the amount of space available to your Dropbox account and, if there is insufficient space available for all your needs, you will have to upgrade your account (for which Dropbox will charge you).

Con – Dropbox can take up a lot of storage on your Android device for its caches.

Con – Uploading changes to Dropbox can only happen when Internet access is available and this can cause a delay before all your changes are uploaded and thus secured.

Con – If you do not choose the “Dropbox WIFI updating” option in the Folderway settings, Dropbox can eat up a significant portion of your monthly Network data allowance.

Con – If you do choose the “Dropbox WIFI updating” then Folderway must wait until a WIFI connection is available before it can initiate the data transfer.

Con – A Dropbox Datastore is limited to around 5000 records. Each folder and item in your Folderway system is a Datastore record.

Con – Restoring all your data can be a lengthy process since everything has to be transferred over the Internet from Dropbox to your device.

It is strongly recommended that you use at least one of these facilities to guard against the loss of your Folderway data should you change or lose your phone or if the external storage (SD card) on your device should develop a fault. As an alternative, there are many third party backup apps available in the Google Play Store which you may consider using as the primary means of securing your data.

OTHER FACILITIES

You can export items from Folderway and then copy them across to your PC or Mac, usually by plugging your Android device in to a USB cable connected to the PC/Mac or via a Bluetooth connection. The items you export will be held in a directory of your Android device’s external storage (SD card) called Folderway_Export. Similarly, you may place files from your PC or Mac in to the Folderway_Import directory of your device’s external storage and then use Folderway’s Import option to bring them in to an appropriate folder.

Folderway fully support Android’s Storage Access Framework (SAF) which is available from Android version 4.4 (KitKat) onwards. This means, for example, that if you create a new word processing document in Quickoffice then when you tap the Save As option, Folderway will appear as one of the places where you can save the document to. If you then switch from Quickoffice to Folderway, you will see the new word processing document in the relevant folder selected by you. If you tap on it, Quickoffice will open to allow you to view or edit it just as normal.