Last Sunday, I told myself that I would spent 10 minutes to do something productive. I did, and ended doing more.

“Back FavPeople Up!” is the latest software I have created for Windows Mobile devices that sport HTC’s touchflo 3d user interface. Basically it is a backup utility tool to manage the  favorite contacts found in the touchflo’s “People” tab. The challenge here is not so much about building the application itself (as I have found out building using managed code speed up the development cycle tremendously). It is really the effort to find out how and where HTC embeds its favorite contact information. After scanning through the entire windows registry and hundreds of manila files (HTC’s custom xml files), I figured out that it must be in the PIM database, where all the contacts, appointments, etc are stored.

The hack requires some understanding of the POOM (Pocket Outlook Object Model), and contact is one of the objects in the model. After some trial and error, I finally found out that the information are saved under the property set in the contact object

For download of the utility, you can go to xda-develoeprs to download