jamespr's WebLog

Blogging on http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile

jamespr — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:06:00 GMT

Thanks to Khush for pointing out I hadn't updated my blog in a long time!

It made me realize I hadn't really signed off with this blog and had left everything hanging. YOu can find me, from time to time, blogging on http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile

James

Blogging From Latin America

jamespr — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:04:00 GMT

I got a mail this morning from our DPE star down in Brazil Fernando Zandona telling me that he's switched his blog from his native Portuguese to English. Personally, I think having a Portuguese blog was pretty cool but I guess it cuts down your readership a little :)

You can catch up with Fernando here : http://blogs.msdn.com/fzandona/

Welcoming Palm to Windows Mobile

jamespr — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:32:00 GMT

If you missed the webcast this morning, Bill Gates (Microsoft), Ed Colligan (Palm) and Denny Strigl (Verizon Wireless) announced a partnership to bring a Palm device running Windows Mobile software to the Verizon network.

You can watch the webcast here :

If you're new to the Windows Mobile world, my name is James Pratt and my team looks after our developer platform including articles, webcasts, events, our MSDN presence and a bunch of other stuff. We've pushed live some materials today to help Palm developers find out more about Windows Mobile, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/windowsmobile/howto/palmos/default.aspx

And of course, if you're a Palm developer who's interested in the new Windows Mobile device, my blog and the Windows Mobile team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com./windowsmobile) are a great way to keep in touch. Let us know if the content above is helpful and what else you'd like to see.

James

A Little Something Special Coming on Monday

jamespr — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 16:05:00 GMT

This seems like it says what it can before Monday ...

http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0509/25267/SFO_Teaser.asx

What are you doing with your i-mate JASJAR?

jamespr — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:17:00 GMT

My good friend Mike Hall is wondering what PDC attendees are doing with the i-mate JASJAR they purchased.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2005/09/15/468020.aspx

Answers to HW Questions from PDC Panel

jamespr — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:51:00 GMT

The results are in! The panel consisted of :

Jim Mann (HP)
Jeff Samitt (Lenovo)
Mike Booth (Motorola)
Bert Keely (MSFT, Tablet Architect)
Jeremy Jacobson (MSFT, Windows Mobile Hardware Engineer)
Derek DiPerna (MSFT, Cellular Network Expert)
James Pratt (Panel Host ... expert in nothing!)

We had a lively 1.5 hour discussion with lots of good questions from the audience. In response to the questions you asked on the blog :

Q: Will devices converge so that everything ends up running just Windows on small hardware?

A: This came up a few times and the answer was always consistent. While we may one day be able to build devices that can run full Windows in a small form factor the characteristics of a device are defined by what users want to do and not all users want to run full Windows. We were pretty certain that devices wouldn't ultimately converge.

Q : When will we see devices with dual screens?

A : Some already exist today for Windows Mobile. The platform supports it but it's up to the OEM to build it. There doesn't appear to be much demand. There were some cool Windows Vista based Tablet PC demos during the show of devices with dual screens.

Q: When will we see devices with built in hard drives?

A : Imminently. The Samsung i300 has a built in 3Gb hard drive for example.

Q: What are the current limitations on smaller, thinner PDAs?

A: Mike from Motorola alluded to the challenges of getting all the "stuff" required to run Windows Mobile into a very thin form factor. Nevertheless, the Motorola Q is a very thin looking device. Ultimately, it comes down to how practical it it to use a small device. Once the screen gets below a certain size, a user may have difficulty tapping items or reading them. One audience member asked the opposite question : when will screens get big enough that my baby boomer eyes can see them!

Q: When will we see an end to different WiFi and Bluetooth stacks?

A: We didn't get to this question but from my perspective, competition and choice are a good thing in any market as it drives cost down and innovation up.

Q: When will I get one device that does it all?

A: I asked this question in terms of, "when can I get my Star Trek Tricorder?". By which I mean a device that has apparently low battery consumption, limitless bandwidth wherever I am, accepts natural speech input and can connect me seamlessly to exactly the resources I need when I need them without me having to filter search results. The answers varied from : you could build it today to not for another 20 to 30 years. We'll see how we're doing at the next panel!

James

SMS Voting App for 5.0 ... With Source!

jamespr — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:42:00 GMT

It was my pleasure here at PDC to meet Dave Glover. Dave is one of Developer Evangelists from Down Under (Australia). Dave showed me this cool 5.0 Smartphone app he's written for collecting informal surveys during presentations, meetings etc. Participants can SMS their vote to the device and it records and tabulates the results.

It's written in .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and uses new managed APIs in Windows Mobile 5.0 for intercepting incoming SMS. Interestingly, if you search in VS 2005 help for SMS Interception it'll take you directly to Dave's sample.

You can find more information as well as his source code here

PDC Announce : Plantronics Headsets Arrive!

jamespr — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:36:00 GMT

Any PDC attendees who ordered a Plantronics headset with their promotional device yesterday and were given a voucher when they collected the device, should bring their voucher to the Mobile Planet booth to exchange it for the headset. Good ole FedEx!

What do YOU want to know abou the future of mobile device hardware?

jamespr — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:26:00 GMT

I'm hosting a panel this coming Friday (9/16) at PDC about "Future Directions in Mobile Device Hardware". I have a panel of experts from both Microsoft and OEM partners including HP, Motorola and Lenovo. We'll be covering both Tablet PC and Windows Mobile topics.

Rather than ask specific product questions, I'll be asking about hardware directions, industry challenges and the like. For example :

"What is the biggest challenge you face in creating compelling mobile device hardware?" I"m aiming to get some discussion of usability as well as features v battery life.

""What's the most important area of technology innovation that will improve your products?" Trying to get discussion around technologues that will be important in the near to mid-term future.

"We're starting to see phone devices with 4 radios (cellular, wifi, gps, blue). What's the next important innovation or adition to devices?"

"Do you think integrating 3D hardware into device platforms is important?"

So there's some of the questions I'll be asking around. While I've got this panel of industry experts in device hardware and cellular comms together, what do you want to know about the future of mobile device hardware?

Arrived at PDC 05 (9/11/2005)

jamespr — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 00:55:00 GMT

It's good to be back in LA for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). When I was here 2 years ago for PDC 03 I remember Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) and an early build of Longhorn (Windows Vista) were the talk of the show. We - the mobile devices team - were getting developers going with Smartphone 2003 and were merely hinting at the innovation coming in Magneto. If I recall, I lost my shirt in a "bet" with Ori Amiga during his session ... I challenged him to get his Smartphone Developer Kit up and running for one of his demos, he accepted, succeeded and I lost my shirt. I was fortunate to be wearing a T-shirt under my shirt.

2 years on and PDC 2005 is less than two days away. In the mean time, we've shipped Windows Mobile 5.0 including many of the features we talked about at PDC 03 have come to fruition (managed APIs for messaging, telephony and calendar as well as the Stat and Notification Broker). Already this year, there's already quite a buzz here in the LA Convention Center. PDC attracts a very specific kind of person and that's someone who is DYING to find out about new technology. And they're arriving early and in numbers. I was sat in the Network Operations Center this afternoon having a meeting and you could hear the noise around CommNet go up a couple of decibels every 10 minutes.

And as for technology, there's quite a feast on offer. Attendees will be getting hands on with Windows Vista, there are Office 12 banners all over the place so I assume they'll be learning about that. I'm sat right now in the GIANT hands on lab area containing hundreds of PCs as far as the eye can see ... well, my short sighted eyes at least.

And what of Windows Mobile? We're focussing on 5.0 for this show although we have a nod to the future with our "Future Directions in Mobile Hardware Panel". We've tried to provide some more "practical" content so we have Marc Brown talking about how he built and got rolled out the internal Microsoft Pocket Expense application. We have Andy Sjostrom coming in to share his top ten tips for business solutions built with mobile devices. And ... we have a little something special to share with attendees but you'll have to wait until the conference starts to find out about that :)

Write Once, Run Anywhere or just on your target device?

jamespr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:10:00 GMT

News.com ran an interesting article yesterday http://news.com.com/Write+once%2C+run+anywhere+not+working+for+phones+-+page+2/2100-1037_3-5788766-2.html?tag=st.num. It looks at the promise of "Write Once, Run Anywhere" on the J2ME platform. My takeaway from it is that when you write a J2ME application for one device, there's typically incremental work moving to a new device. How does this compare with your experience coding for J2ME and what sort of apps are you building? To what level do you experience that on Windows Mobile?

Should I go MP3?

jamespr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:06:00 GMT

After going through hoops to get my music from iTunes into my Media Center UI it got me thinking about music formats. When I started with my iPod, I chose M4A because it enabled me to save space on my iPod. iTunes now has a facility to transcode songs down to a smaller size when it syncs to save space. Media Player can also do that which is important for my Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center (http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id=YH-999GS%2fXAA). That set me wondering whether I might just be better creating high quality MP3s for my server and then just letting them be transcoded down when I sync. Of course, I have to figure out exactly how I'm going to create those high quality MP3 files as well as what "high quality" really means. Maybe I could even go lossless?

Issues

Space. I'm going to need a bigger hard drive. With a 40Gig library at 128kbps I'm going to increase that to MINIMUM 60Gig if I go MP3, more if lossless. I only have 80 Gig allocated at the moment.
Time. Do I really have both the time and inclination to re-encode 800+ CDs?

I'll keep you posted.

Syncing Windows Media Player and iTunes

jamespr — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:59:00 GMT

Syncing Windows Media Player and iTunes

We've talked about me being an iPod owner and we talked about me building a Media Center PC - we did talk about that right? Maybe not! Well that's the topic for another post but for now let's take a step forward. Initially having an iPod locked me into the M4A format. When I bought my iPod nearly 2 years ago I had a choice :

a) Keep my format "open" and encode everything in MP3. Because I care about quality, 128 MP3 doesn't do it for me so I'd have to go 192kbps

b) Use the proprietary M4A format from Apple which I'm happy with at 128kbps and free up 50% more space on my iPod

THe whole reason I own an iPod is so I can carry an obscene amount of music with me so that extra space was attractive. So I selected option b) and went about encoding my existing CDs and all CDs since then to 128kbps M4A.

And then I got my Media Center PC ...

One thing I LOVE is having all my media in one place and one interface. Media Center uses Windows Media Player which doesn't support M4A so I had a problem. How do I get all 10000 or so M4As to show up in my Media Center PC? And I found a solution.

The first part of the solution concerns enabling Media Player/Center to play M4A files. M4A files are AAc encoded and while a number of freeware AAC codecs exist none of them really did too good of a job. In the end I bought a codec pack from www.3ivx.com who enable general MPEG4 support including both audio and video. The great thing about their product is that it installs the decoder and registers the file type with Media Player making it very easy to setup.

THen I hit upon another problem. Using this method, Media Player cannot read the tags from the M4A files meaining that my Media Player library was a mess. Songs were listed by filename and all infomration about album, artist and full track name were lost. Bummer! With 10000 songs it becomes pretty hard to work with just a list of filenames.

After a considerable amount of searching I stumbled upon Music Bridge (http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=26&MessageID=94304). Music Bridge does a pretty good job of solving my problem. Rather than making Media Player able to read the tags in the file so it can build the library, it uses the programming interface in both iTunes and Media Player to synchronize library information from one to the other. Net result is that now Media Player and hence Media Center have album, artist and song name information for my files and I can navigate more easily. Music Bridge is able to sync bidirecitonally and can sync album art and playlists in addition to tag information.

MusicBridge is currently free.

I still have acouple of outstanding gripes and issues :

* MusicBridge isn't flawless, it sometimes gets choked but the developer is responsive and committed to fixing issues
* When I rip new CDs I need to remember to run MusicBridge again, it's not automated
* Media Player won't pick up ALL my files ... it knows about 9200 of 10000 so for some reason it's choking on a few, I haven't investigated that yet.

Ask Microsoft : What are your burning questions about Windows Mobile development?

jamespr — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 03:01:00 GMT

If you subscribe to Pocket PC Magazine (http://www.pocketpcmag.com) you'll know that they have an Ask Microsoft column. Hal, from Thaddeus the publisher, has asked me to answer questions for this month's column on developing for Windows Mobile. I'm looking for questions from out there in the developer community!

The questions could be about which Microsoft mobile technology to use when, new stuff in Windows Mobile 5.0, why certain features exist or don't exist, why things work the way they do or anything else loosely related to development that is on your mind. I'll try to answer as many as possible through the Pocket PC Magazine column.

I'm going to start writing my answers next Monday (July 11th) and will have it finished by July 18th so try to get them on my blog by Monday/Tuesday!

Windows Mobile Developers and Longhorn

jamespr — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 02:59:00 GMT

I started thinking about Windows Mobile developers in the context of Longhorn today. I'm assuming - and I don't know because it's a closely guarded secret even within Microsoft - that Longhorn will be released in the next couple of years. The first thing I was wondering is what tools people will be using to build applications between now and when Longhorn ships. So I want you to put on your time travel hats. Given the tools you use today, eMbedded Visual C++ 3.0 and 4.0, and Visual Studio .NET 2003. Given also that Visual Studio 2005 will release this year and supports development in managed and native code for Windows Mobile 2003 and upwards. What tools do you think you and your company will be using in two years time? What's your migration path for getting there?