GScroll

tools

In case you are using the HTC Touch Pro or DHTC Touch Diamond, get your hands on the demo version of GScroll. Simply copy the .cab file to your device and start it from there. It runs for five minutes only, but this should be enough to convince you to get this tool.

It makes use of two of the built-in sensors of your HTC Touch Diamond/Pro to navigate in applications. The nice but less useful one to the Tap & Tilt functionality. Double-tab the center wheel and tilt the device to navigate within your applications. The more interesting one is the Swipe control.

Swipe

By swiping your finger over the buttons you can navigate left/right and up/down. This becomes very handy e.g. using the photo and video collections. Using the touch screen there often causes the touch screen to recognize the swiping as a tap, opening the photo. Also navigating within Windows folders becomes quite comfortable.

A further feature is to assign the buttons to additional programs. However, this means not by pressing the button. It means by tipping the buttons. Once, I received the device I was quite frustrated to have only limited buttons on the device, compared to my previous devices.

How does it work: The device has not only the resistive touchscreen, the button panel is also a capacitive sensor which causes in fact that the navigation wheel works.

With a price of $4.99, there is no reason to support those guys in buying a copy.

Link: http://www.mobilesrc.com/GScroll.aspx

Creative Commons Add-In for Office 2007

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The Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office 2007 allows you to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into PowerPoint, Word as well as Excel.

“This add-in enables you to embed a Creative Commons license into a document that you create using Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, or Microsoft Office Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others. The add-in downloads the Creative Commons license you designate from the Creative Commons Web site and inserts it directly into your creative work.”

Once installed, you’ll find a new tab at your ribbon called Creative Commons. The License button allows you to create a new license for the document.

Creative Commons License Add-in

For me, it was always a pain to browse through the CC licenses to find the appropriate one. The add-in allows you to step through all options:

Select license type dialog

Allow commercial uses dialog

Allow modification dialog

Jurisdiction dialog

Finally, you select the license and assign it to the document. Visuals will be added automatically by the add-in and the license is then downloaded fro the CC web site.

Add/remove license functionality

Added license

Quite nice add-in that gives you some boost in productivity, especially when you deal often with Word and PowerPoint documents you hand out to the public.

Location, Location, Location for EndNote

quick tips,

This evening, I moved my thesis documents and all it’s dependencies to a new machine. Using Windows Vista, most documents are located in %UserProfile%. Most of them, but not all. EndNote X stores its styles in its program folder by default. The styles are located in %ProgramFiles (x86)%EndNote XStyles (on my X64 system). To change this, go to Edit / Preferences… / Folder Locations and change the Style Folder option.

EndNote Styles

It’s a simple tweak, however, it allows you to manage and backup your own styles in a much more efficient way.

Photosynth goes Live

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Live Maps came up with a new feature where you can find your Synths on the map. However, not easy to find whilst looking the first time for it.

Live Maps

To get the Photosynth collections, zoom into any area of interest, and select Collections and Explore Collections from the upper right menus.

Collections

On the left side you can choose from which collections the results should be displayed. The fourth icon provides a list of Synths from the region in the viewed area.

Synths

Delicious Add-on Update

tools

This morning, I was pleasantly surprised by this message box! Especially the first point was quite annoying. Using multiple machines for development I am using the Delicious add-on to share my bookmarks among the different computers.

New Delicious Add-On

In detail we got the following fixes:

1) Fixes problem where bookmarks are sometimes not saved in the user’s Delicious account.
2) Fixes problem with bookmarks not working from long toolbar menus.
3) Edit bookmark dialog now extends vertically to show all users from your Network.
4) Improvements to tag suggestion functionality when saving bookmarks

Keep Your Blogroll Up-to-date

how-to

It’s quite annoying to keep the Blogroll on your weblog up-to-date while using offline readers. Using RSSBandit and dasBlog brings a quite handy solution to you. First of all, open your dasBlog configuration and check the ‘Enable Config Web Service’ option.

Enable Config Web Service

Now open the ‘Options’ dialog of RSSBadit and select the ‘Remote Storage’ pane. Here check ‘Use remote storage’, select ‘dasBlog’ from the drop-down list and fill out the required login credentials. Your API usually is located at something like http://YouBlog/ConfigEditingService.asmx’.

RSSBandit Options

To sync, simply select the ‘Upload Feeds…’ or ‘Download Feeds…’ command from the tools menu.

Upload and Download Feeds Option

No idea, why I haven’t seen this, yet. But this option finally allows my keep my online Blogroll up-to-date with a few mouse clicks.

Sync'ed blogrolls

Unwrapping the O2 Diamond Pro

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Ordering an O2 Diamond Pro aka HTC Touch Pro one week ago, I was told that the delivery might take three to five weeks, as the device is not available yet. I was quite surprised as a parcel arrived this morning. What’s inside? The brand new O2 Diamond Pro. The packaging is done a bit Apple-style, making unveiling the phone to some kind of experience.

Xda diamond pro packaging

Opening the package will reveal the phone. In terms of style and experience, the O2 branding is quite nice, but at the end the content is more interesting.

O2 xda diamond pro revealed

For the impatient user there is a quick-manual for the phone and forth TouchFlo 3D user interface. Also you get ActiveSync 4.5 and a 60-day trial version of Microsoft Outlook on CD-ROM. For those with a lot of spare time you’ll find a 350 pages manual. Nice through for the inexperienced user.

Xda doamond pro content

The included accessories are more or less surprising USB and TV cradle, USB handset, replacement pen. The most surprising one is the USB cradle. Standard USB to mini USB, which goes directly to the charging plug.

Xda diamdon pro accessories

SIM, microSD and battery can be simply inserted by removing the back cover. There is no button to release the cover, so it works similar to the HTC TyTN II (aka HTC Kaiser).

After turning on the phone the first time, the O2 setup will take about 2 minutes install the branding and setting up the phone. This might differ for each provider. Connecting to the Exchange server took only a few steps. And that’s one of the coolest features when using a Exchange server at the back: getting all your contacts, appointments, tasks and mails to your new phone at once.

What is nice: Beside the replacement pen, you’ll get a clear screen cover that can be placed on top of the touch screen, increasing its durability. I haven’t realized any drawbacks using the touch screen with it.

What is disappointing: The case that comes in this package does not fit to the phone. It a leather-kind, slip-style case which is only half the size of the phone!? To me it feels like this is the case for the Xda diamond (without keyboard).

What is also disappointing: With a regular price of 500 £, I would expect at least some kind of microSD card within the set. In contrast, the Nokia E71 came already equipped with a 2GB microSD card.

The keyboard feels quite solid and the slide functionality behaves a bit as the one of the HTC TyTN II and not as cheap as of the HTC TyTN. If you are used typing on the TyTN or TyTN II, you’ll get used to the keyboard quite fast. The pen slides into the phone automatically as soon as you have inserted it more then 50%. That’s no magic, but quite nice.

So far, the device and its accessories are quite satisfying. As I experienced the first time with my O2 Xda, Windows Mobile Device Center displays a preview of your Xda.

Windows Mobile Device Center

NETCFv35.Messages.EN.wm.cab!?

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Today, I run into a quite annoying error message while developing a application for Windows Mobile 6.1.

“An error message is available for this exception but cannot be displayed because these messages are optional and are not currently installed on this device. Please install ‘NETCFv35.Messages.EN.wm.cab’ for Windows Mobile 5.0 and above or  ‘NETCFv35.Messages.EN.cab’ for other platforms. Restart the application to see the message.”

The required files are located at C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft.NETSDKCompactFrameworkv3.5 WindowsCEDiagnostics, assuming you have installed the Windows Mobile SDK. I copied the file NETCFv35.Messages.EN.wm.cab to my device and run the installation. So far it worked fine, until the same exception popped up again.

Using the .NET CF Logger, from Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5, I was able to track it down to the following error:

“Failed to load [System.SR, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=969DB8053D3322AC]”

To do so, you choose the device you want to log and select which logging options you want. The log files can be found then in your application folder on the mobile device.

.NET CF Logging Options

With this new input, I found Martijn Hoogendoorn’s blog entry. He came across the same issue some time ago and provided a solution to this miracle. If you have a look inside the .cab file, check the _setup.xml file.

NETCFv35.Messages.EN.wm.cab _setup.xml

Extract and rename the file SYCCFA~1.001 to System.SR.dll and include it into your project. Rebuild, deploy and debug it – it should work fine.

First Impressions on Google Chrome

tools,

Google Chome is out:

“Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

It looks very lightweight, though. Reminds me to the early beginnings of Netscape and Internet Explorer. It gives you the impression that it’s quite fast. However, during rendering it looks a bit like Safari.

Google Chrome

For some pages that look quite nice in Firefox and Internet Explorer, rendering also behaves a bit odd. So, is this one more browser we have to test our Web application against?

Messed Up Rendering in Google Chrome

One feature provided is the creation of application shortcuts on your desktop that will open the Web site in its own, plain window. Very nice but failed several times when I tried. not sure if it’s worth switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Source: http://www.google.com/chrome

Synthing Karlsruhe

web

I did a third Synth, this time I got it 100% synthy. In this try, I used about 30 images of Karlsruhe, I did during a night session. I also used a panorama, I created out of a few of this images. This seems to be a quite good approach to help Photosynth to create the good Synth.

 I’ve also used the first time the map feature you can find at your Synth’s page.

Map

You simply select the place, where your Synth belongs to and save it along with it.

Location of Synth