dale lane

I’ve used Microsoft Money for years – ever since I started using MS Money 97 at Uni. I can’t imagine how I’d keep on top of finances without it.

The tricky bit is having to enter transactions into the software every time you buy something – something which lends itself perfectly to a mobile solution. Rather than waiting until you next get to your computer, enter the transaction immediately by jotting a quick note on your mobile.

I bought a copy of Spb Finance. It’s almost perfect…. except that the syncing between PDA and PC sucks*. I’ve tried everything to get it to work – including working with the support guys at Spb, collecting trace and log files for them and multiple re-installs in different configurations. No joy – syncing is still unreliable, has corrupted my Money file a few times, and even when it works it has a habit of chewing up all remaining CPU cycles on the computer, making my ThinkPad run scarily hot.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing something for myself.

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.NET Compact Framework doesn’t support auto-complete in text entry controls. I didn’t realise that until I wanted it for a Form I was throwing together tonight, but there you go.

So, in the spirit of Hack Day (which I’m still gutted to have missed!) I had a quick stab at throwing together something myself.

Read on to see what I mean, and how I did it. (And to tell me a better way to do it!)

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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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