TamsWMS – the Windows Mobile Smartphone Blog

Windows Mobile icons have always been an eeker of some sort: while not as batshitly difficult as S60 application icons, they have nevertheless given me quite some thought due to the lack of specification on Microsoft’s behalf.

Fortunately, Microsoft has now tackled the problem – the Windows Mobile blog team has just added a post which starts like this:

This post provides a step-by-step tutorial for creating professional iconography for your Windows Mobile application. With these guidelines and Adobe Photoshop, developers will learn to apply the appropriate styling and sizing to their image assets for use within their applications as well as in the Windows® Marketplace for Mobile. In addition to the tutorial, a Photoshop action file is provided for assisting with the creation of the required files. Developers who are planning to distribute applications on the Windows® Marketplace for Mobile are encouraged to utilize these guidelines to ensure their applications adhere to the application submission criteria.

Even though the tutorial is very well-written, it seems to require that wannabe icon makers own a recent copy of PhotoShop. This means that GIMP heads are likely to be left in the rain when it comes to sample images – but they can now get their hands onto the sizes there, too.

Further information can be had here:
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2009/07/24/creating-custom-icons-for-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx

Developers: this bit of news will hit you like a punch:

…

Under the new Net60 Explore license developers may use Net60 free for non-commercial use. The Net60 Explore license is a perpetual license and is linked to an individual device IMEI number. Developers can easily create licenses for themselves by visiting our website and downloading Net60. A Net60 licence will automatically be emailed to them.

Net60 Professional and Premium have no device royalty fee.

A second change to our licensing model is that now commercial users of Net60 can now create S60 applications using .NET and distribute them royalty free. There is no longer a per device fee.

Find out more at our sister site TamsS60:
http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/2009/07/13/net60-free-for-non-commercial-use-royalty-free-for-commercial-use/

Microsoft’s C# programming language sometimes reminds me of a pinata – it is full of surprises. The latest one comes in the form of the two delegate definitons below:

//DELEGATES
public delegate void doneSearchingDlg();
public delegate void newResultDumbDlg();

doneSearchingDlg doneSearching;
newResultDumbDlg newResultDumb;


In case anybody is new to C#: a delegate is a function pointer which can accumulate multiple functions, which are then called at once with a single call. But this is not the reason for this little rant – instead, I am pissed about why the declarations cannot look like this:

//DELEGATES - CAN NOT COMPILE AS OF VS2005
public delegate void doneSearchingDlg() doneSearching;
public delegate void newResultDumbDlg() newResultDumb;


In plain-old vanilla C, almost every language primitive can be animated while it is being declared – why this feature was omitted from Delegates is a mystery to me.

Ideas, anyone?

Microsoft France’s product manager for all things mobile has made a very interesting quote in a recent MobiFrance interview:

Audrey Zolghadr: 20,000 applications are now available for Windows Mobile. For the launch of MarketPlace, 600 applications will be available. It will be possible to retrieve the software from the search engine. Only software compatible with the screen resolution, touch or not touch will be visible to the user.

600 applications is might not be too much – but is nevertheless impressive especially of compared to what other manufacturers have unleashed upon their customers (Palm: less than 50 apps, Nokia Ovi: full of crap)…

Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework is slowly but surely picking up speed all over the world. The current version 3.5 generally seems to be pretty ok…but, in time, a successor will come (anyone recognize this quote?).

A PPCGeeks user has posted a CAB file containing version 3.7 of the .NET CF. As of now, nothing is known about improvements or changes – as the new language features will likely require a new version of Visual Studio, there is little to gain here for developers.

Either way, hit the link below for the download:
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=71466

Microsoft has just unleashed the Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK upon the masses:

Surprisingly, the SDK is based on the Windows Mobile 6 SDK and even goes as far as to require it installed. This gives us system requirements of at least Windows XP SP3 (no Windows 2000) and Visual Studio 2005…

Hit the link below for further info (and be pprepared for a 300MB download if you wish to develop for Standard and Professional)!

Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK

Microsoft has recently opened its Marketplace to developers interested in registering. As of now, customers and the press are not allowed in – the quote below hits us via ComputerWorld:

In a potentially market-changing move, Microsoft Corp. plans to let customers of its upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile run purchased applications on as many as five Windows Mobile phones at the same time.
This would primarily benefit individuals who own multiple smartphones running the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, which is needed to access Microsoft’s online store.
…
Marketplace customers will also be able to get a no-questions-asked refund on an application, provided they request it within 24 hours of their purchase
…

Even though this sounds extremely developer-unfriendly, my personal experience tells me that these issues are very rare. I have been selling applications for the Palm OS for about five years now, and have to say that less than 5% of customers ever demand a second unlock code or a refund (even though ESDs have offered this for quite some time).

I see the problem somewhere else: Microsoft lets customers know about these possibilities. Austrians say that opportunity creates theft…which is what we are likely to see here…

Ideas, anyone?

Seth Godin is the man behind a very interesting marketing blog, a bunch of top-selling business books and – last but not least – the concept of permission marketing. I thus was somewhat surprised to see him talk about graphics design…but felt that his list could be useful nevertheless.

Seth listed a variety of books and web sites which could be helpful for people wanting to become decent graphic designers – further information can be had here:
http://www.squidoo.com/become-a-really-good-graphic-designer

MobiHand has just informed me of an important change in company policy which will allow their developers to compete more effectively in ultra-low-price markets. Their move comes at a crucial time as credit crunch and iPhone push application prices down – enjoy:

We are happy to announce a change of price limits intended to allow you greater pricing flexibility.

The current $3.95 minimum product price in the MobiHand Catalog is changed to a minimum selling price of $0.99 in MobiHand network stores and $2.95 in developer shopping carts.

Please do not set any product price less than $0.99 for sale in any MobiHand store.

If you use a MobiHand shopping cart in your website or application, please do not offer any price or discount that results in a net selling price in the shopping cart that is less than $2.95. If you need to sell any product for less than this amount, please contact us to arrange a modified shopping cart fee that allows us to meet your needs without incurring losses on individual transactions.

Even though I am not too motivated to lower my products prices as of this writing, the added flexibility definitely is nice to have. Congratulations to MobiHand…

Mr. Kaar (of mSports fame) and yours truly spent quite a few minutes of our lives scratching our heads recently – the Setup.dll contained in one of our projects kept failing with the error message found in the title of this post.

Fortunately, the solution is easy. Open the linker preferences via right clicking on the affected project, then click command line and change the displayed values to /subsystem:windowsce,** (the ** are the numbers which are already there, just remove the appendix).

The image below shows a Windows Mobile 5.0 project (sorry for German IDE):

Then, do a clean recompile, and the “Fatal error LNK1112: module machine type ‘THUMB’ conflicts with target machine type ‘ARM’” eekers should be over.

P.S. For all those of you interested: ARM processors support two different instruction sets going by the names ARM and THUMB. ARM is 32 bit wide, while THUMB provides optimal performance on machines with a 16bit data bus.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio unfortunately is quite expensive…which has caused small developers to look for alternatives. As Microsoft has so far steadfastly refused to unlock Express Editions for Windows Mobile development, an alternative had to be found.

CodeProject’s Joel Ivory Johnson has taken a detailed look at a way to develop Windows Mobile applications via a free third-party IDE – if you want to save some cash, hit the link below:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/WiMoSansVS.aspx

The .NET CF was originally intended to be highly portable: unfortunately no implementations were made available except for the various breeds of Windows Mobile.

Developers who want to extend the reach of their .NET CF apps to the millions of Nokia devices in the market have thus looked to a South African company called Red Five Labs – their Net60 runtime allows .NET developers to target S60-based devices.

Net60 has just received a major update, adding touchscreen support under S60v5 among other changes. The full press release is below:

We’re proud to bring you another improved release of our acclaimed Net60 .NET framework for Symbian.

Our 4th release in as many quarters contains many significant improvements.

Version 2.1 now has a great looking WinForms UI which is much more stable than previously. The look and feel of the controls is more polished, much faster and all known issues related to the UI have been fixed.

The Net60 Version 2.1 UI also supports touch, meaning S60 5th edition devices are now supported!

Cross-platform Mobility Framework
Net60 is compatible with Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and our 30 day trial now ships with an evaluation version of the Red Five Labs Mobility Framework. The Mobility Framework incorporates a host of managed APIs in a collection of DLLs which make it possible to develop cross platform solutions for both Windows Mobile and S60 using one framework. We’re shipping a great sample application which demonstrates the concept using the messaging layer provided in RedFiveLabs.Mobile.Messaging.DLL.

We’ve also made major advances on our runtime: performance has improved overall with significant improvements in many sub-components of the class libraries. Its a much more stable build.

The development tool chain also contains many improvements. Our debug build of Net60 containing the Net60 Launcher now supports folder navigation and loads wait cursors and icon resource files too.

The Genesis wizard now generates your application’s .pkg file and also allows developers to edit and therefore customise their .SIS file.

The folks at Silica’s have just let me know about a promotion which could be very interesting to all these of you wanting to get deeper into the ROM hacking / device building game:

With every purchase of Platform Builder for Windows® Embedded CE 6.0 in March and April, you will receive a copy of the new Windows® Embedded CE 6.0 Fundamentals book – absolutely FREE*!

To claim your FREE book, simply place an order for Platform Builder with SILICA before 30th April and the book will be sent directly to you.

Further information on the promotion can be had here:
http://www.msembedded.biz/

Don’t ask me why a presentation on user interface design made it into the IEEE proceedings schedule of the FH Hagenberg’s NFC Congress. Nevertheless, being the UI fetishist I am, Alice Moroni’s presentation struck my interest. Enjoy:

Alice started out by presenting a few cases of extremely bad design:

According to her, catastrophes like the ones above are caused by a wrong approach to design – it does not consider the user:

The solution is called user-centric design…which means putting the user at the center of the development process:

Understanding users can be difficult – the slide below presents an overview of users needs:

Prototypes are very useful when it comes to figuring out how users “tick”:

Unfortunately, user tests are not easy. Their experience showed them that users should not be given too many tasks at a time (among other things):

Users must be monitored discreetly, as their behavior changes the moment they feel monitored:

Point-of-view cameras can be useful:

Alternatively, a screencast solution can be used:

When it comes to determining the users, a surprising thing pops up: 5 users are usually enough to find 85% of all eekers; whereas 15 are likely to find all of them according to J Nielsen:

The next surprise: advanced users loathed their simple application. Some missed core features, while others felt that the program was “too lowly” for their taste: