I mentioned last week that watching Doctor Who made for a good chance to absentmindedly play with some code. I seem to have started a new habit, so thought I’d share what I was worked on this week. 🙂
One of the problems with my HTC Universal is running out of storage space when trying to install new apps. The core Windows Mobile 5 tools that you can use to work out why you’re short of space are fairly limited:
- Search – listing all files on the device larger than 64KB (an odd size to choose – and without the ability to specify which folder(s) to search in, you end up with a very long list)
- File Explorer – shows file sizes and lets you sort a folder’s contents by size (but going through each and every folder on the device manually is fairly tedious, and there is no way to get the size of a folder without adding together the size of the contents yourself)
- Memory applet – showing you how much space available and how much in use (useful to identify that you have a space issue, but not any use in working out why)
You often just look around and rely on trial-and-error to free up space. (Like clearing the Pocket Internet Explorer cache then finding that you have a big chunk of space freed up.)
The aim for yesterday evening was to produce something to visualise the usage of storage space on the device.
Not a terribly original idea (basically a simplified approach to drawing a tree map), but unless my ability to use Google is getting worse, I don’t think anything like this is available for Windows Mobile at the moment.
I think it might be a useful little app, and it only took a bit of an evening to throw together. 🙂
If you’re curious, read more to see some screenshots and a quick description of what I did.
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