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Show Traffic for Singapore (v1.1) with kinetic scrolling

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Kinetic scrolling is essentially a new improved way of scrolling a page, or a list, and is finger friendly and visually more pleasant. It was first found in iPhone user interface, but more and more applications in other mobile platform, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian, are following suite. In Windows Mobile, there is no SDK exists, to my knowledge, to enable developers to add this new scrolling feature to the application without substantial development work.

Last weekend, I managed to reverse engineer this feature and included it in my latest Show Traffic application. Check out the video, and you know what I’m talking about!

You can download the latest version from this link. Version 1.1 is now “skinable” (yay! my first skinable appy) and is compatible to both Q(W)VGA and (W)VGA Windows Mobile devices.

To skin the application, you have to modify the following image files

  1. BG_selector background image of the item
  2. BG_highlight background image of the selected item
  3. BG_spacer background image of the spacer between items
  4. BG_title background image of the title bar (at the top of the application)

Additionally, if your skin is a white/light-color based theme, then you need to change the foreground and background colour so that the text can be readable on your light-color based theme. This setting can be found in the registry path (HKCU\Software\Zenyee\ShowTraffic) You can download this zip file for a sample light-based skin with the appropiate registry.

Show Traffic – Another Windows Mobile quicky app

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TrafficCamYou may like to call it an iPhone app clone. I got to acknowledged, that iPhone apps, less those mind-less ones, have been churned to serve a purpose in one’s daily life. Traffic CAM SG is one of them, which displays the road traffic in Singapore highways.

However, other than a more intuitive interface as a result of the iPhone UI, there isn’t really a breakthrough functionality that can’t be offered outside of iPhone. The live traffic, is afterall taken from the local authority website (OneMotoring), and I decided to bring this capability to Windows Mobile world.

That said, the Windows Mobile SDK doesn’t really offer gesture-based interface, unless you work in the native C++ environment. Since this application is meant to be a “quicky” one (as I cannot afford to burn my weekend just for this) so I have to design and build based on what compact .NET framework could allow me. This is built in less than half a day, including creating the graphics and the testing of the links, so please pardon this appy for its very basic interface.

Note:  Traffic images and contents are sourced from Intelligent Transport System Centre of LTA (Land Transport Authority). You may go to this OneMotoring link for the online version.

You can download the beta from here (only WVGA/VGA supported at the moment)

New hack to disable HTC’s messaging application

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HTC has, since manila 2.5, designed and developed a completely new text messaging application (HTC Messaging App) to replace the old Windows messaging application for the entire SMS/text messaging functionality. Some of you may not be affected by the poor performance of HTC messaging app. But for me, it’s so poor that despite trimming my text messages to just 200, every operation (open message, compose a message, etc) takes a few seconds at least, and it is just not usable for me. It looks to me as if HTC has designed, developed and tested with just a handful messages in mind.

So I did some investigation, and found out a way to disable HTC messaging app, and revert back to the original Windows messaging application, i.e. pocket outlook, for text messaging. Technically speaking, it’s a combination of registry tweak and a small patch utility I wrote to overcome a bug/problem as a result of disabling HTC messaging application.

Screen03

Installation process will automatically apply the hack and install the patch utility

You need to restart your device to have the changes effect

You need to restart your device to have the changes effect

Uninstallation will undo the hack automatically

Uninstallation will undo the hack automatically

You can download from here

Back your favorite people up!

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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

Rotate Screen Utility Updated

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It is a lazy Sunday today, and I feel that I should at least spend 10 minutes doing something productive.

Few days ago, a fellow forumer in Xda-developers had requested for a feature in my Rotate Screen utility, which was created some 8 months ago while I was developing the navigation panel for Xperia. So I decided that I should just add that in today.

RotateScreen

Rotate Screen essentially is a small footprint utility that enables you to rotate your Windows Mobile screen. It supports rotation via user interface or command line. Using command line method, you can rotate your screen via toggle mode (toggle between two orientation modes), set mode (set your screen to a specific orientation mode) or cycle mode (rotate your screen to the next available orientation mode, from 0 to 270 degree)

More information can be found in this XDA-developers thread

Buried to distract

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It started all so positively in April, but for the last 1 week, it’s a hope that crushed big time.

The best treatment to the disappointment, I think is to continue to be buried by work, and perhaps my other past-ime work.

Speaking of which, I did quite abit of enhancement to my pointui calendar applet, and hopefully I can release it in the next couple of days. In the meantime, take alook at the preview of the next release.

Multi Language Editor – make it easy

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Found out that my Multi Language editor was not orientation aware, so decided to make the necessary changes. It ended up with an additional feature that allows one to configure the keyboard settings through a user interface, instead of having to fiddle on the registry as in the previous version. In the setting user interface, you will be able to choose the preferred primary and secondary input methods (which usually correspond to a distinct keyboard locale/layout) The primary choice will also be set as your system default keyboard locale accordingly. The latter will be useful when you install third party IME software, as the installation usually overrides your factory default setting, in terms of the keyboard setting.

 

You can download from this link

Stay Unlock goes 2.0 after two years

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Since I developed Stay Unlock two years ago, it had received numerous feedback. I had also started the habit or was it a hobby, of developing small software utilities to do stuff that default Windows Mobile does not provide, e.g. Bluetooth Notification hack, and most recently LED notification. From applying my knowledge of Windows Programming acquired 10 years ago in Windows Mobile development, I have also finally decided to take the opportunity to explore C# and .NET programming. For sure, these development toolkits make development life of a Windows Programmer much easier, as compared to say 10 years ago. You always learn something new but it is also important that you know the fundamentals!Anyway, inspired by the comments from Stay Unlock users, I have decided to pull forward the upgrade effort which I had originally planned for during my year  end vacation (now it looks like I can take a good break in December!). It took me a day, and I’m hoping that it will be useful for existing users of Stay Unlock, although I know during the last one year, many variant of Stay Unlock had surfaced. Continue reading →