Mobile

Twitter with style

Martin Hinshelwood — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:14:55 GMT

I have been using an excellent piece of software for twittering form my Windows Mobile. Twikini has all of the features you would expect, as well as working fantastically with the IPhone like features of Windows Mobile 6.5.

I had used a few of the other apps that are available, but I think this is the best for the way that I use Twitter. The only thing that I have had a problem with is that on my phone keyboard between the “r” and the “t” is the hotkey for “Tweet”, and I quite often send in an unfinished tweet. Really a phone issue, but could do with an optional “confirm tweet” checkbox.

Ahh well, can’t have everything…

Technorati Tags: Twikini,Windows Mobile

Microsoft MyPhone service available to the public

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:12:53 GMT

Microsoft recently opened up there beta of the MyPhone service to the general public. The service syncs your Mobile phone with the web and allows access to your Contacts Calendar tasks, pictures and more.

I have just left it running, but you can add stuff to your phone through this interface as well. I see the bonus of this as a backup, which I kinda have with Plaxo.com already for my contacts and calendar, but having your pictures and video up there too is much easier than connecting your phone into the computer.

I do not know what the bandwidth is like, but the fact that you cant set the sync any more frequently than once a day is an indication that it must be intensive. Make sure that you have a good hold of your data tariff for this one (I have unlimited for £9 from Orange), but for a beta it is a pretty cool service. I would like to see it integrated with SkyDrive for storage and a roll up of all these bits into http://home.live.com…we can but hope.

Setup you phone by going to http://myphone.microsoft.com

Technorati Tags: MyPhone,Microsoft,Windows Mobile

Presenting Aplication Lifecycle Management: Precursor

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:59:24 GMT

I am doing a presentation this afternoon on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). This is the first time that I have ever presented on this topic, and I found out that I was doing it on Friday!

I have put together a bunch of slides pulling information mostly from Wikipedia. I have another presentation afterwards on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), but it is the ALM one that scares me. I already had canned slides for Visual Studio Team System, but ALM is something that I have really only begun to get a handle on. I know enough to know that I do not really know anything at all :)

So why am I doing it?

Well, if you are involved with TFS in the UK you will probably know, or have heard of Neil Kidd. He is the current UK "Developer TS Visual Studio Team System" at Microsoft. I have delt with him both at events and in the context of work, and I have found him knowledgeable, helpful and patient, even when I ask stupid questions.

I had heard that he was moving to another area within Microsoft (I think something to do with the TFS Rangers), but I was surprised when one of the guys (thanks Jon) I have delt with at Microsoft over the years gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in the "Developer TS Visual Studio Team System" position... Wow, an internal recomenation...

So here I am, on an easyjet flight on my way to London.

And I now return to the topic of this post, I do waffle so...

The reason the ALM presentation is making me anxious is quite apart from my fledgling knowlage on the subject, my slides are terrible! No really... They are so bad even I have trouble following them, or even coming up with a story behind them.

I am going to have to use my slides as vague pointers and try to create a presentation on the fly...bad I know, but it is the best decision out of a bad bunch. I have an hour interview before the presentation so maybe I can do some limiting of the expectations. The second presentation on Visual Studio Team System should go a little better...I hope...

If you are going for an interview at Microsoft make sure you lock yourself away for however amount of preperation time you need, with no distractions! That means no Tv, Xbox, children, wifes, family events of any kind. Preferably you should go to a cabin in the mountins with only your internet connection to keep you company... ;) Wish me luck....

A problem with Diarist 2!

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:22:30 GMT

{Rant}

I think that it would be good to remove the drop down to select your blog from the main blog writing page.

I tapped it by mistake when I was trying to select a piece of text and lost my whole post...

Only 10 minutes of time, but an entire train of thought!

{Rant}

Working from a Mobile again!

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:21:36 GMT

As I am traveling today and I am not taking a laptop, I want to be able to do a little personal work from my mobile..

What I would realy like is to be able to monitor and edit my CodePlex (Team Foundation Server) work items from my phone! And I am not talking about some crappy web based solution, I hate not being able to work offline, but a Smart Client application like the one I am using now (Diarist 2) that can let me work away with cached work items and then sync later!

If only the TFS API, excellent though it is, could be used without the need for Team Explorer to be installed.

What to do when you dont have a working computer!

Martin Hinshelwood — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:14:13 GMT

I have a little problem...I don't have a computer at home at the moment :( So I am writing this post from my Pocket PC using Diarist 2. I will come back to that, but first...

The reason for my lack of my "can't live without accesory" is that my laptop has finaly given up the ghost. It is an 8 year old Dell desktop replacemnt, and in my infinite wisdom I desided to install Vista just after it went RTM. All was well for a while, but it was a litle slow. Add Visual Studio 2005 and things got a little slower...

It took aroung 3 months to sucessfuly get SP1 installed, yes I was one of those unfortinate users that had problems, and my laptop has never been the same since. For example, uninstalling VS2008 Beta and moving to the RTM took near enough 74 hours...Not good...

Well, it worked for a month and then started blue screening. Could be anything, but when I bit the bullet last night and desided to go back to XP I kept getting errors reading the disk which could on reflection be the disk, but I have a feeling that the hardware is toast...

So here I am writing this post on my phone and its not such a bad experience, although I have found that many sites talking about mobile software and devices don't actualy support viewing on a mobile device! What is that about...

I needed to look for some software to write this post, and obviously I found it, but it did require me to use most of the bits that an average person uses on a computer.
- Searching the internet
- Loading and reading web pages
- Downloading and instaling software
- Writing documents

On top of this, although I have never used it, I have a cut down version of Office 2007.

Taking allof this into acount I have found it a relatively painless experience, but I do accnowlage that I am not an average user and a terrible speller...

Now all I need is a version of Visual Studio 2008 and Team Explorer ;)

Technorati tags: Windows Mobile, Blogging

Information Sync

Martin Hinshelwood — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:08:51 GMT

Over the past year of using the Windows Mobile Device Center on Vista as well as ActiveSync 4.5 I have become increasingly disillusioned with them both and searching for another tool that would do the job better.

Why Mobile Device Center is a bit pants!

I have found that it has become increasingly difficult to connect my mobile to this software and I have had to hard reset my phone a number of times to get it to work again. At the moment it just does not connect at all to my laptop at home, which is just as well as I would end up with a multitude of duplicate contacts ever time I sync between two mobile. And not just my contacts, at some points I have had my phone go off at midnight (when I am sleeping) with five or six birthday alerts for the same person!

ActiveSync has many of the same problems...

Interim Solutions

I even went through a phase of installing Exchange 2003 and Active Directory on my server just to use Exchange ActiveSync...Which is cool, and useful.. But not really worth the overhead of managing it at home.

I wanted to go further and have my contacts update their own information. So I started using LinkedIn as a contact repository, and using the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar I had a lot of success. I have used LinkedIn for this purpose for a couple of years now, but I am now finding that I have a multitude of these collaboration sites under my belt, and I really need a tool that sync's with all my online tools and my offline ones.

A better way

And so this leads me to Plaxo. This is by far and away the best tool I have come across. It's so good, I even paid the subscription fee to get the extra features like Mobile Sync, contact backup and others. And you know that is not like me :)

Plaxo has this marvelous tool called the "De-duper". Can you imagine what it does :). And I will tell you something, I went from 1250 ish contacts to 920 without even breaking a sweat...

There are many more Syncing options available, although some are only for paid up members...

And what does Plaxo do for me...

Contacts

Plaxo provides a single point of truth for all my contacts. I can have an email sent to any of my contacts to get them to update their details, and they do not even need to be members of Plaxo to do this :).

Sync's my Contacts from Outlook at work
Sync's my Contacts from Outlook at home
Sync's my contacts from my phone
Sync's my contacts from LinkedIn (One Way)
Sync's my contacts from Google

I get a very nice little profile (http://martinhinshelwood.myplaxo.com) that I can control how and who can view my information.

Calendar

I have two calendars setup on Plaxo that overlay. One for my personal and one for my Office calendar items. Both calendars applier in both my Outlook's and as I am using 2007 I can overlay them if I want to.

Sync's my Calendar from Outlook at work
Sync's my Calendar from Outlook at home
Sync's my Calendar from my phone
Sync's my Calendar from Google (One Way) [hopefully not for long]

My calendars are published in two formats: one that has a friendly URL (http://martinhinshelwood.myplaxo.com/calendar) that is publicly available as a free \ busy publication and one that has a crazy URL that has my actual meeting subjects in them for private access.

All of my calendars are synced to my phone "over the air" in a consolidated view...

The future

There are a number of features I would like to see in Plaxo as, although they are in beta testing of version 3 of their website (the one I am using) there are a couple of niggly things that mildly irritate me. Though I am impressed with the number and functionality of the syncs that are available. Many more than I use...

The ability to see the last time contacts details were updated by me, and by them (even if they are not members of Plaxo)...Maybe an option to request an update from all contacts that have not updated details in 1 year.
No notification on my windows mobile for PlaxoSync when it fails to connect unless I manually initiated a Sync.
The ability to choose when adding an event which calendar it goes into from my phone...Currently I am not sure what will happen...
The ability to control the viability of individual fields of information on my profiles...mainly to control what is displayed on my http://martinhinshelwood.myplaxo.com page.
Adding the ability to sync RSS feed lists with Outlook, IE, Google and others....

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Plaxo, LinkedIn, ActiveSync, WMDC, Windows Mobile Device Center, Active Directory, Exchange, Exchange ActiveSync

Blogging about...

Martin Hinshelwood — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:42:49 GMT

I have not had much time to blog over the last week so I thought I should write this to get my head round what I have been up to.

I have been busy at work with documenting deployment procedures and requirements, an application deployment, Managing production applications and reading email.

I have been busy at home with my baby girl who was born last month.

On top of all this I have been seriously looking at contract work, and I have been involved in discussions with one of the program managers for the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server at Microsoft about joining his team in Redmond. Oh, and I have been viewing houses for a possible move...

I have not even opened Visual Studio apart from Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 to have a peek, nor looked at my TFS Event handler project on CodePlex.

So technology wise, what have I achieved in the last month?

Well, not much is the easy answer, but here is what I have looked at:

Installed Visual Studio 2008 on both Vista and XP as well as installing Team Explorer 2008.
Played with my colleagues HTC Touch.
Checking out Office Mobile 2007.
Played with Simpsonize Me!, Southparkify and MSN Cartoon (Beta)

All in all, a pretty quiet week! :)

Technorati Tags: Personal, Avatar, MSN Cartoon, Southparkify, Simpsonizeme, Application Owner, Microsoft, Jobs, HTC Touch, Deployment Documentation, application deployment, daughter, TFS Event Handler, Visual Studio 2008, Team Explorer, Vista, Xp

Office Mobile 2007

Martin Hinshelwood — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 22:41:53 GMT

This week I installed Office Mobile 2007 on my Windows Mobile 6 (Black Shadow) SPV M3100, and I have to say, what changed?

I can now see my RSS Feeds as part of Outlook Mobile 2007, but apart from that the only change was the addition of OneNote Mobile 2007.

I had already installed OneNote to assist with my note taking in the Office as my writing sucks. OneNote also syncs with the desktop version and I could not now do without it.

It is good that this is a free update...

Technorati Tags: Office Mobile 2007, Black Shadow, Windows Mobile 6, RSS, OneNote Mobile 2007

HTC Touch / Black Shadow Weather

Martin Hinshelwood — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:41:30 GMT

If you want to have you city displayed in the HTC Weather Home screen then you need to do some editing!

My colleague Ajay just purchased a HTC Touch yesterday from Orange and he was upset that Glasgow was not listed in the cities.

Now, I have a SPV M3100 with Black Shadow installed so I though that they way I fixed mine would work... But no, you need to do some registry hacking to get it to work on the HTC Touch as the file you need to change is on the ROM and not in an editable part of the phone.

HTC Touch instructions: Local weather on the HTC Touch

If you have a Black OS / Other HTC: HTC Homeplug Weather fix - get your LOCAL weather! CAB files now available!

The registry edit is easier if you have an official Touch, but I was able to simply edit the xml file and save it without any extra complicatedness...

Technorati Tags: HTC Touch, Black Shadow, wmblack, Weather, HTC Weather, HTCHome, HTC Home