Wireless: Microsoft gets even more mobile

Read this interesting interview of Ron Markezich, chief information officer for Microsoft, on how th company is issuing company-owned cellphones and mobile devices to employees. So far employees were using their own devices.

"As of July 1, Microsoft began issuing company-owned cellphones and mobile devices to employees who request them, a change from its previous policy of supporting workers' personal devices on an ad hoc basis.
Part of the reason, Markezich said during an interview during a trip to Paris, is that employees are going to get them anyway, and company ownership gives Microsoft greater control over access to its internal network." Read more...

How To: Display the clock in all programs

By default the clock only appears at the top of the Today screen. Open any other programs and it disappears. You can change this behaviour and have the clock always up there.

Tap Start Settings System Clock & Alarms More and check Diplay the clock on the title bar in all programs.

You can also access Clock & Alarms directly from the Today screen by tapping on the Date plugin.

BETA: TextMaker 2006 for Pocket PCs

When TextMaker was released for the Pocket PC three years ago, it was an overnight sensation: a full-featured word processor with the capabilities of a desktop word processor and perfectly adapted to Pocket PCs.
If you thought there wouldn't be a way to improve on TextMaker 2002, think again...
TextMaker 2006 for Pocket PCs is here and offers a huge array of improvements.

NEW: Drastically improved document filters for Microsoft Word and RTF
NEW: Import of OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument documents
NEW: Complete AutoShapes-compatibel drawing layer built in
NEW: Automatic numbering of headings and paragraphs
NEW: Line numbering
NEW: Hierarchical bullets and paragraph numbering
NEW: Easily indent/outdent lists and paragraphs with a key press
NEW: Track changes in your documents for easy revising
NEW: Comments as balloons

Download

Hubdog brings Blogs to Windows Mobile devices

Countless number of people out there are reading almost everything on their mobiles and it’s growing everyday.
To help bloggers address this new opportunity, SRN has officially launched Hubdog Blogger Program: http://www.hubdog.com/affiliates
Hubdog’s mobile publisher program allows affiliate bloggers to create mobile versions of their blogs that are perfectly fit to Windows Mobile devices. Plus the service is completely free and totally user friendly.
See for yourself: http://www.hubdog.com/channel/2499/preview
The program’s built-in marketing toolset allows partner bloggers to add their own personalized subscription button or “chicklet” to their blog’s sidebar. This allows Windows Mobile users to easily get an optimize version of their favorite blogs on their devices, a version that can be access either online (live mode) or offline (podcast mode). Read more...

How To: Align the screen every few weeks

When you tap a selection in your Pocket PC and nothing happens, or another button is selected instead, the touch screen most likely needs alignment. It's a good idea to align the screen every few weeks to avoid the alignment getting so skewered that you can even correctly tap items on the edge of the screen. To align the screen, tap Start and Settings. Select the System tab and select Screen. Click the Align Screen button. You'll see a cross-shaped target; tap it accurately and firmly. The target moves several more times until the screen is aligned. After the screen is set, Screen Settings should appear again. Click OK and Close to return to the Desktop, and your alignment should be improved.

Microsoft to deliver IE 7 through Automatic Updates

Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer 7 in the forth quarter of 2006 through Autmatic updates. Since AU requires little user intervention, the software giant "will give users a chance to opt in or out of receiving the IE 7 release".

Although software delivered via AU usually is sent automatically without any interaction from the PC user, Microsoft will give users a chance to opt in or out of receiving the IE 7 release, Schare said. This is following the same tactic Microsoft used when it released Windows XP Service Pack 2, which included the previous version of IE, he said. When the IE 7 release comes up on a PC’s AU service, the service will ask users if they want to install it now, not install it at all or install it later. Read more...

How To: More memory is not enough

We never have enough memory because the more memory we have the faster our device as well. Most applications want to install themselves to the device memory, but with some tweaks it is possible to force them to save data to the storage card. First you will need to have a registry editor and secondly you must be very careful. You must not play with the registry if you don't know how to. You're doing this at your own risk. Else, open up your registry editor as we're going to change the settings for Internet Explorer and the inbox so that Temp files, cookies, History and emails are moved and stored to the Storage card.

Go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders And change the following keys to show:
\Storage Card\Pocket IE\Temporary Internet Files
\Storage Card\Pocket IE\Cookies
\Storage Card\Pocket IE\History This will ensure all your IE cache goes on your storage card.

Create the following folders on your Storage Card:
\Storage Card\Inbox
\Storage Card\Inbox\Attachments, Next, create the following registry entries:- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MAPI:
AttachPath=\Storage Card\Inbox\Attachments
PropertyPath=\Storage Card\Inbox

Free: Pocket MSN Search v1.0

Almost everyone knows that MSN Search site doesn't have version optimized for PDA devices. But now exists Pocket MSN Search application and you can search all Web resources via MSN search engine with you favorites Windows Mobile devices.
As you can see on attached screenshots, it's easy to use this program. Just type keyword, optionally select some options and click 'Search' from main menu.

Application has localization for English and Polish language.

All URL addresses are opening in default web browser with Skweezer.net service to optimize selected pages for PDA devices.

Download (Requires .NET CF v2.0)

New: MultiIE 4.0 Available Now!

MultiIE is a $17.95-worth plugin for Pocket Internet Explorer. Its main feature is the multi-window capability. But I find the price expensive and I'd rather buy opera mini which has more features and supports SSL. By the way, I did buy Opera 8.6.

How To: Delete email accounts

I once had to delete one of my email accounts and could not easily figure out how do it. It's nowhere mentionned that you you have to tap and hold on the the account itself and a menu will appear with the option to delete the account. As this is not quite obvious, here are the steps that will let you do it.

Open Messaging

Tap Menu - Tools – Options – Accounts tab. Tap and hold the account and select Delete.

That's it.

Off topic: Free MS Visual Basic 2005 book

This is worth the download. You will learn how to program stuff for Windows Mobile. Sample codes are also available.

Get a focused, first look at the features and capabilities in Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and the .NET Framework 2.0. If you currently work with Visual Basic 6, these authors fully understand the adoption and code migration issues you'll encounter. They'll step you through a quick primer on .NET Framework programming, offering guidance for a productive transition. If you already work with .NET, you'll jump directly into what's new, learning how to extend your existing skills. From the innovations in rapid application development, debugging, and deployment, to new data access, desktop, and Web programming capabilities, you get the insights and code walkthroughs you need to be productive right away.

Download book and sample codes

Free: Make your Programs icons smaller

This utility lets you modify the size of your program icons in the Programs folder. You will be able to view them in list mode and with details. This functionality is available in Windows desktop. You can download it here free.

The programmer's website has several interesting utilities like adding icons to the today tray utility. Do not hesitate to make a donation.

How To: Change Internet Explorer Home page

To better optimize my PDA, I thought it wise to replace Internet Explorer default home to a real webpage. This way, a connection is immediately initiated when I launch Pocket Explorer and Pocket PC Mauritius is displayed on the screen. There are two ways to change the default home page. The first one is through Internet Explorer options and the second requires modifying the Registry. Remember: Messing up with the registry can render your pda useless. Be extremely careful.

Open Internet Explorer
First thing you need to go the page you want as your homepage, Pocket PC Mauritius is a good example :-). Tap Menu – Tools – Options – General Tab – Use current.

or

Open Registry
Go to HKLM – Software – Microsoft – Internet Explorer – AboutURLs - Home and insert the link to Pocket PC Mauritius.

News: rich content display on low-CPU low-memory devices

Actimagine offers a great solution for viewing entire movies on mobile devices. So far Nokia and SonyEricsson offers free blockbusters on their latest smartphones.

On mobile phones, Actimagine software solutions can be used to deliver TV-like video: movies and music clips, full screen at 30 frames per second. Content can be embedded in the handset, streamed through 3G networks or stored on memory cards and SIM cards. Full length blockbusters can be packaged on 128MB.
Video Ringtones and Games based on vector graphics are also two main applications. Read more...

Free: Start Menu Gridview-Listview Toggler for WM5 Smartphones

This utility allows you to change from the default listview to Gridview. If you don't want to install the program because of space constraints you can modify a registry key:

Change the GridView DWORD value in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shell\StartMenu as follows:
* GridView DWORD Value = 1, for GridView
* GridView DWORD Value = 0, for ListView

Download

How To: Adjust text size

Your Pocket PC pc lets you modify the text size. This way you can either see more contents on your screen or make reading easier. However this change will apply to the whole device and not a specific program. This is how you do it:

You need to go to Start > Settings > System and tap the Screen icon, then the Text size tab. You will be able to adjust the text size, using the slider, to your convenience.

Free: Toonel the bandwidth saver

Toonel.net exploits a tunneling technique combined with data compression. It runs compressed data frames from toonel client to one of the toonel servers and then these are forwarded to the target host. Reducing the size of resources that are transferred between the server and the client makes more efficient use of the user's bandwidth.

Toonel.net: what it is good for and why is it different?

expensive transports (e.g. GPRS, CDMA…)
cross platform
narrowband or slow connections (e.g. dial-up)
built from open source components
stretching download limits
allows to compress virtually any traffic

Download here

How To: Restore broken shortcuts

I'm starting a series of How to topics which I hope you will find useful. Your contribution is most welcome or you may even email me problems that you came across and I'll help you fix it.

Let’s say that you’ve installed a software on your SD card and it’s been working fine until the day you removed the card to use your Wifi card. After that your programs just stopped working as before because of a “Could not locate path” problem. Not even a soft reset would fix it.

Believe it or not, it’s very simple to fix. Just open File Explorer and navigate to where you installed the program. Click on it and hold then select Copy from the menu. Then go to Windows\Start Menu\Programs\, Tap in an empty space and select Paste Shortcut from the menu. If you receive a message warning you that the file already exists and if you want to replace it, just click OK. Then go to Start > Programs > your software, tap and it should work.

AirFolder - The Unlimited Memory Card.

Need more space on your device? Then get ready to spend $29.95 for Air folder. Once you have a connection established you can even listen to music that you stored in Airfolder. I guess that will work if you manage to keep your internet connection open that long. I don't know about you, but I'll stick to my 4GB SD card.

AirFolder is an application that allows you to access your files and folders on our server directly from File Explorer on Windows Mobile device. When you install AirFolder, it will create the new folder, "Air Folder", on your PocketPC or SmartPhone. When the software is running and you are connected to the Internet, you can access your AirFolder just as you would any local storage on your device. You can easily drag and drop files and entire folders from your local storage to your AirFolder account.

Read more

A fix available for ActiveSync 4.2

Users have reported experiencing problems with connecting to the internet from the device when upgrading from ActiveSync 4.1 to 4.2.

ActiveSync version 4.2 made a change to how it interacts with the Windows networking stack to use Layered Service Providers (LSPs) on outgoing Desktop-Pass-Through connections. This allows for improved compatibility in environments where connections to the internet must be passed through these LSPs (ISA Proxy is one such example). Unfortunately, it appears this change has caused some issues for a small segment of users who have LSPs that interfere with ActiveSync communication.

There is a registry key fix which will essentially remove this change.Please download and rename the attached text file with the .txt extension to the .reg extension.

In other words, change the file LSPvalue.txt to LSPvalue.reg. Afterwards, please double click on the newly renamed .reg file and click on the "Yes" button.This should resolve your issues.

Thanks,
Edington
--
Edington Watt
Windows Mobile Platform
Microsoft Corp.

LSPvalue.txt


Via PdaPhonehome.com