HoppeRx - the cure for your ailing device : FitNFinish

Fit N Finish for Qwerty Keyboards

MikeCal — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:57:00 GMT

This FitNFinish document describes a number of best practices for creating Windows Mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards. Although there are a lot of suggestions for placement of keys, my main purpose for writing this was to describe the best way to handle shift, shift lock, alt, and alt lock. This subject is surprisingly complex, and I’ve seen a number of QWERTY devices handle these functions incorrectly. See section 3 of the attached document for a detailed description of the correct operation of these keys.

The attachment contains the FitNFinish document, “QWERTY Suggestions” in both Word 2007 and PDF formats. The content is the same in both, so use whichever file works best for you. There is also a KeybdFnF.exe. This is a Windows Mobile application that will run on both touch screen (PocketPC) and non touch screen (Smartphone) devices. The application allows you to test that your shift and alt functionality work correctly. It asks you to type certain key combinations on your device, shows what your keyboard sent, and compares that to what it should have sent. The program will verify that your shift and alt keys match the suggestions in section 3 of the document.

The program was written with the Windows Mobile SDK. Please let me know if you have any trouble running it on your devices.

Mike Calligaro

FitNFinish for Battery Life

MikeCal — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:52:00 GMT

This is the first of the FitNFinish articles that we’re planning to write. (If you’re wondering what FitNFinish is, read this.) As with all FitNFinish articles, the intended audience is Windows Mobile OEMs who write drivers and platform code. End users won’t find much to help them here.

The goal of this article is to teach you how to go about investigating power consumption on your devices. If your code is using more power than necessary, reducing that consumption is a very inexpensive and effective way to increase your battery life.

There are two main parts to this. First is a “Power Optimizations” document that gives an overview of how to go about finding and fixing unnecessary power drains in your device. The document is available in both Word 2007 and Adobe Acrobat formats. Both versions have the exact same information, so use whichever format is more convenient for you. The second part is a tools distribution that contains a few tools referred to in the document. Specifically, it has celog for the device and a tool to parse celog files for the desktop. Neither tool is new, and you may already have them. I just wanted to put them in one place to make it easier to reference them in the document. You will find these tools under the “Logging” subdirectory.

Because the blog only allows one attachment per entry, everything is put together into the attached “FnF Power.zip” file.

I hope you find the information useful.
Mike Calligaro

Introducing FitNFinish

MikeCal — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:33:00 GMT

Hello everyone. My name is Mike Calligaro, and I’m a Development Lead in the JDP organization. We’re going to be doing a series of documents and tools for Windows Mobile OEMs here, and we’ll be placing them under the meta tag “FitNFinish.”

FitNFinish is a set of “best practices” that you can use in developing your devices. These are things that our experience tells us make better phones. For instance, there are many different ways to do caps lock on a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. After working with a large number of different QWERTY phone devices, we’ve determined that the best way is to hit shift twice. There will be a FitNFinish document that explains why this is as well as a tool you can use to test whether your device follows the document. For another example, there are a number of things you can do to improve the battery life of your phone designs. There will be a FitNFinish document that describes many of them.

These will be recommendations and suggestions, not requirements. We believe that following our suggestions will lead to better devices, so we would like for you to do what we recommend. However, we understand that you have good reasons for making the decisions you make, and we want to let you decide what works best for your own designs. For that reason, these best practices will not become part of the LTK. Please at least read the suggestions though and, if you choose not to follow them, do so for a good reason.

If you completely disagree with any of the FitNFinish documents, we would definitely like to know your concerns. You can post comments here or contact us through your OEM PM or TAM. Also, if there are any topics you’d like to see us cover, please let us know.

I hope you find FitNFinish to be useful.

Mike Calligaro