Power is still out for several hundred thousand here in the Seattle area, but our servers are back up and we're fully back in business.
If you haven't already installed it, we encourage you to take a look at the latest build: much small, with performance and battery drain improvements.
During a crazy storm last night in the Seattle area, 1 million people, including most of Redmond lost power, bringing down all Slam servers. We don't know exactly when the servers went down, but no Slam messages have gone though since we first started checking early this morning. As soon as power is restored, we'll get the servers operational. In the meantime, here are just a few shots of the damage from the storm:
We've been working hard over the past month on a new build of Slam to help with performance and battery drainage issues. Today we release a version with the following improvements:
- Radically smaller size. The smaller application uses less device memory, helps with 'phone bog', and overall is more efficient. Note the 385k installer (down from 732k)!
- Re-worked home screen plugin. New plugin interferes less with your device's home screen.
- User settings for new content checking frequency. Checking for new Slam content is by far the biggest hit to your phone's battery. You can now change this from the default of every 10 minutes. So, if you set this to 20 minutes you will be saving almost half of Slam's battery usage. You can even set Slam to 'Manual' checking and then just use the Send/Receive command when you want a content update. To access the frequency settings, select Menu -> Options -> Check for New Content from the Slam home screen.
Important: Except in the case of 'Manual' checking, Slam maintains the same content checking behavior of frequent checking (every 30 seconds) after any activity (e.g., you send or receive a message) until the activity dies down at which point it goes back to your specified check interval. In our opinion, this approach strikes the best balance between preserving battery and keeping you up to date on Slam content.
Do note that these changes do not affect the performance of the application itself. Here we are focused on minimizing impact on your phone. However, we threw in a few other changes, including support for the address book when inviting people to a Slam.
Download the new build here (www.msslam.com/slam.cab).
If you are already running Slam, you will need to remove your current version before installing the new build. To remove Slam: exit the application via Menu -> Exit from the main Slam screen, turn off your Slam home/today screen via your device settings, then remove Slam via your device's Remove Programs function. Sometimes programs are hard to remove. If necessary, restart your device after exiting Slam and removing the home/today screen, then just delete the Slam folder using File Explorer. (Slam removal instructions also available on the about Slam web page.)
-- Slam Team
Thanks for all the great feedback from everyone. We've noted all the issues and are working hard on fixes and improvements. Lot's of folks have the Motorola Q, so were trying to get our hands on one for debugging the screen layout issues (thanks Tom for the screenshots!).
I wanted to address the performance and battery drainage issues. Slam is a fairly aggressive application for these devices from the standpoint of being graphics-rich and requiring significant data access, and these do have a cost. However, it can always be improved and we are working on some tweaks that should mitigate issues with bogging down your phone and battery drainage.
We hope to have the new build available sometime next week, and we'll be sure to let you know as soon as it's ready.
And here's a little Friday treat. When we originally developed Slam, we made a goofy little video to show people internally how it is used. Here, for the first time, we make it available to the public.
Speilberg, eat your heart out.
We released a new build yesterday. The main improvement was to text entry boxes on certain Smartphones. If you have one of these, you no doubt will have noticed that the text entry box (e.g., when writing a message) showed the previous screen rather than a white background. T9 text entry was almost unreadable. We believe this to be a bug in the compact framework 1.0 with painting multiline text boxes. This build includes a workaround that mostly fixes the problem, although note that it introduces the side effect of a few extra line returns at the end of your message (we're working on this).
If the funky text entry boxes are bugging you and you'd like a fix, install the latest version of Slam without losing any of your data. You can install Slam right over the top of your current install, although this tends to be finicky. If it doesn't work, try exiting Slam and also removing the Slam home screen/today screen plugin before installing. If that doesn't work, you can always remove Slam (see About Slam page for instructions) and then install the new build.
Thanks and we hope you're diggin' Slam!
The Slam team is pleased to annouce the first release of Slam: your Windows Mobile social software client and service. Slam allows users to make and manage social groups right from their phone for group-based messaging and photo sharing. You can also use Slam through the SMS and/or web interfaces.
See screenshots and learn more about Slam on the about Slam webpage, and get started your self by downloading the installer or having a link sent to your phone.
We've started the Slam blog to support end user discussion and feedback, as well as support and announcements from the Slam development team.
We're always trying to improve, so please let us know what you think about Slam!
--Slam team
