Posts Tagged ‘windows mobile’

(Another!) Mobile app to share where you are

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Mobile location sharing is something that I keep coming back to: from finding where my phone is using GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi Access Points, GSM Cell Ids, using my own hand-rolled systems or newer services like Google Latitude, dopplr, OpenCellID and Brightkite.

There is something about the promise of location-based apps which I find very exciting.

This is my excuse, at any rate, for sharing my latest bit of tinkering. 🙂

The stuff that I’ve tried so far has been focused on long-term sharing – apps intended to run in the background on your phone all the time, sharing your location with a pre-arranged list of friends and family who have signed up to the same service.

I’m playing with an app which comes at this from the other angle: an app for specific occasions to share your location. Not something to run in the background all the time, but an app to use when you want to let someone know where you are – a specific person. This could be a friend or family member, or a colleague or client (perhaps someone who hasn’t signed up to any service that you have).

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Stripping out MIME headers

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

A couple of years ago, I wrote a small plugin for Outlook Mobile (the version of Outlook that you get on Windows Mobile phones) to help me triage my emails.

The idea was to make it quicker to process my email from my phone, by adding a couple of context menu items to emails that let you create a new To Do item in Outlook Tasks, or a new diary entry in Outlook Calendar.

So if someone sends you an email asking you to do something, with one tap you can create a new To Do list item, pre-filling it with information from the email.

And if someone sends you an email about an event or meeting you need to go to, with one tap you can create a new Calendar item, prefilling it with information from the email.

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A Fire Eagle updater for Windows Mobile

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

I wrote a Fire Eagle web service at Open Hack London a few months ago – that gave a nice, mobile-friendly way to share your current location, as stored in Fire Eagle.

Last week, I finally got round to updating my Fire Eagle Guest Pass web service to use the newer OAuth 1.0a.

This got me thinking that I haven’t used it very much since writing it in May… because while it let me share where Fire Eagle thinks I am, I didn’t have an easy mobile-friendly way to tell Fire Eagle where I am in the first place! 🙂

So while I had “how to do OAuth” fresh in my mind, I thought I’d start writing a quick mobile Fire Eagle client.

I wrote it in C# for Windows Mobile. There are a few interesting points in the code that deserve their own blog posts, but first I wanted to quickly show what I’ve got working so far.

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Improvements to TwitToday

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I’ve been doing too much Java at work recently, so in the interest of keeping my hand in with some low-level C++, I picked up the code for my mobile twitter client, TwitToday, again.

I originally wrote it at a hackday, but I’ve since come back to tweak it a couple of times to get it to spawn background worker threads, add SIP on-screen keyboard support, and improve support for sending special and accented characters.

After another evening of tweaking, I’ve added a few new minor features:

Transparent text box

When not in use, the text box is now transparent. When it has focus, it is coloured in white as usual.

A few people commented that a bright white text box could dominate a dark Today screen too much, so this is hopefully a nice aesthetic improvement.

I did this by creating a custom windows procedure for the text box.

The windows procedure needed to handle a couple of events:

Handling WM_PAINT by using SetBkMode to make the text box TRANSPARENT

Handling WM_ERASEBKGND by using TODAYM_DRAWWATERMARK to draw the background over the text control’s rectangle.

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How good is my mobile network operator?

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

I’d like to think that I’m normally a fairly easy-going person, but we all have our pet peeves and for me one of mine is my mobile phone network operator. They drive me nuts – I never get a signal anywhere!

Or at least, so I thought.

Last night, I put together a quick test to keep track of how much time my phone doesn’t have a signal.

It is technically very simple to do, but I’ll describe how it works in a moment. First, the results. Today was a “typical” work day – I spent most of it at my desk which is by a window on a first floor. I don’t work in a lead-lined bunker, and I didn’t hide the phone in a microwave (does that even work?) or anything like that.

I started the test at home this morning, when I normally start checking my emails and twitter. And it’s been running all day. While in my office, the phone was on my desk. The rest of the time it’s been in my pocket.

It looks like I have a signal more often than I thought – for over seven hours it had a signal, with only a little over three hours with no signal. I was expecting a result with time without a signal being greater than time with a signal.

This is hardly a scientific test, but I wonder if my perception is worse than reality? Maybe all it takes is a few times for the phone to not have a signal when I need it for me to get the impression that it “never” has a signal.

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Syncing browsing between mobile and computer

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Imagine the scene.

You are sat at your computer, reading a fascinating article online.

You’re about halfway through reading it when something comes up and you need to leave your desk.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finish reading the page on your mobile? (Without needing to remember how you found the webpage, or what the URL is?)

With this Firefox extension, you can. 🙂

screenshot

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Posting to Twitter… carefully

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I’ve recently picked up my the code for my Windows Mobile Twitter client again.

It was originally written back in April as a hackday idea. The code posts Twitter updates using a variation on the twitter-from-curl approach of HTTP POSTing “status=MyTweet” to the twitter update url.

I started with the update URL, and appended the message I wanted to tweet. This is fine for a quick hackday demo, but it did mean that you could end up with a URL like:

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=Hello (twitter) world! Special chars = a problem?

Which fails if you want to post characters such as accents or characters which have special meaning in URLs, like + ? / & etc.

I was encouraged by a number of users to have another look at this, which I’ve done now, and hopefully version 1.1 solves the problems.

A quick Google turned up that a number of other Twitter apps share at least some of the same problems that mine had, so thought I’d share the fix here.

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Bye-bye USB syncing, Hello cloud syncing!

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

I’ve mentioned a few times before that I use a personal wiki-based notetaking app to keep myself organised.

In GTD-speak, I use it to store project information, track my actions, store reference info, and lots more. Everything I’m working on will have a set of wiki pages where I’ve written up what I’ve done so far, linked in to my other work and where it fits in with my goals.

So it’s useful to have it with me even when I’m not at my desk. I’ve got the wiki app installed on my ThinkPad and three of my mobiles (HTC Advantage, HTC Universal, and the Treo Pro).

The problem is keeping them all in sync.

The old way

cables, cables, cablesThe wiki stores the pages as normal text files. So I have a copy of all of these text files on each device.

Using a freeware app called MobSync, I can sync a directory of files on my desktop with a directory on the mobile.

If I want to use the Treo Pro, I need to make sure I get an up-to-date copy of the files on there first by booting up my PC, connecting them by USB cable, and running the sync app.

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