XPS, Mobile Devices, and everything Microsoft

Mark All as Read comes to a Mobile Inbox near you

2006-08-30T03:43:00Z

I can't count the number of times I've seen customer requests for a "Mark All as Read" and the dangerous "Delete All" options in the Windows Mobile Inbox's menu. I personally find the "Mark All as Read" invaluable, especially when dealing w/ tons of corporate mail or mailing lists. Hopefully one day soon it will come standard out of the box.

The good news is that these two inbox menu options already exist today! The bad news is that they come only as a sample app in the PPC/SP SDK. That may explain why the average user has never seen it, since downloading the SDK, compiling it, and creating a CAB setup project is quite a pain for a developer, let alone an end-user.

I finally grew tired of flipping through all of my mail to manually mark them ALL as read, and so I went ahead and compiled the code w/ out any modifications, and threw together the CAB project. You can get it below. It should install on Smartphone 2003+ and PPC WM5.0 devices.

For those who are interested in how it works, take a look at the sample code in either the PPC or Smartphone SDK. This is the InboxMenuExtensibility sample in the Samples\CPP\Win32 path.

Announcing Candlelight for the Moto Q

2006-08-28T21:14:00Z

I finally got tired of the super bright screen on my Moto Q straining my eyes everytime I play a late-night game of Sudoku in the dark (doesn't everbody?). Inspired by TornadoLight that I used to run on my SP5m, and by some requests on the Qusers.com forum, I decided to give this a quick go last night.

Run it the first time to set your screen to the DIM level, run it again and select YES to quit and restore the normal backlight.

Let me know how it works for you, or better yet, post your feedback on the Qusers.com thread linked above - it's a great forum.

*UPDATE* - I've posted a new version that removes the YES/NO UI prompt. Makes more sense to just have it toggle on/off and that will make disabling the Low backlight mode easier across a reboot - no need to run it twice now.

Will PUSH email kill my Moto Q's battery life?

2006-08-15T21:53:00Z

There's been a lot of concern over MSFP and how it affects battery life on Windows Mobile devices. But w/ the MSFP update rumored to be around the corner for the Motorola Q - a device already tight on batter life - the debate has spurred up again. Here's some info on the subject that will hopefully calm some people's worries that PUSH email is to blame. That said, I'm very interested in the issue so if you have any solid info beyond a hunch, please let me know.

Here is how MSFP works on the technical side from the Exchange team that developed it:
- http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/06/07/406035.aspx
- http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/04/03/424028.aspx

From Jason’s blog entry:

by default the heartbeat is every 15 minutes but is self tuning. The heartbeat is about 309 bytes which equates to about 1 MB over a month.

In general, it IS dependent on your email use. That said, the heartbeat IS overhead, but depending on its setting it should be minimal compared to the actual email you pull down.

To get an honest baseline, you would have to set your device in a fixed location with a fixed signal, and repro the exact emails. So just about ANY battery life comparison tests you do won't really be valid.

What I suggest is turning PUSH off, and running w/ some time delay, let's say 10 minutes. Then the next day when you'll be doing about the same thing (ie: sitting in your same office), try using PUSH again. If you receive about the same number of emails at regular intervals, you could get a feel for the net difference in battery life for JUST PUSH.

You also need to consider that other fixes on the device from the original ROM and the new MSFP one may have affected batter life regardless of your email settings or useage. In general if they did any radio stack work or tweaked any power settings or timeouts, etc, there would be a difference. I know they work really hard to IMPROVE battery life with these changes, but there's always a chance of regressing.

Also note that setting email notifications to vibrate eats up tons of battery power since the motor is power hungry. MikeCal has a great post about LEDs and the Vibrate motor killing your battery life.

Alpha dialing "solution" on the MotoQ

2006-08-10T23:04:00Z

Very recently there's been a lot of internal talk about the 1-800-flowers dialing problem on Windows Mobile devices. Officially called "alpha dialing", it turns out to be a tricky issue to properly implement it on a qwerty device when the numbers and letters share the same keys. RIM has enabled this with the use of a "shift/alt" or text mode toggle key. That's certainly one solution, and I've heard discussion of several other user experiences that would enable this, but there's no super clean interface that works in all scenarios.

Fortunately some bright forum member over on at qusers.com has found quite a nice "solution" for the problem. He just used the logo locations on the dialer screen to display some bitmaps w/ the alpha numbers displayed under the numbers (like a regular phone). While this doesn't solve the entry mode, it makes entering alpha numbers easy again w/ out the customer having to memorize which numerical key maps up w/ which letters.

Beautiful & elegant solution to such a painful user experience. Tonyxcom & gadget, I salute you!
[original thread]

Intro

2006-06-19T22:19:00Z

I figure it's about time I get my act together and post to a Microsoft specific blog. So now, a little something about me before I begin:

I'm a Program Manager on the Digital Documents team at Microsoft. The Digital Document team owns the new XPS file format, and anything related to Printing or Imaging on the Windows platform. My focus is on Document Lifecycle scenerios around our XPS document format. Workflow, Digital Signatures, and Rights Management in the XPS space is my specialty, so please let me know how I can help or what matters related to this are you're curious to hear more about and/or see code snippets.

In other news, I'm particular passionate about Mobile devices, Bluetooth, local mapping, and location-aware applications and services. I'll try and tag my posts accordingly, but you'll have to bare with me.

-.dq