I was enamored with one of the Today Screen plugins on the new WM Treo, of which you can see a screenshot here:
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.p ... ilable.htm

The plugin allows you to search the web from the today screen. This seemed useful, and I wonder why no one ever thought of it before. I've often debated which to leave my homepage on in PIE, yahoo for me to check my mail and the like, or google, to do quick info lookups. Yahoo has won, but now I could have the best of both worlds.

I decided to try to write a clone of such a plugin, and here's my result:



This is a 1.0/beta version that I'd like people to help me test out. It's not configurable, it will only search google. There are some issues with the Keyboard popping/not popping/not disappearing that I need to work on, and there may be some version and theme problems.

Basically, I'd like to hear from you if it works. I'm not sure if it will work on devices that use anything earlier than WM2003SE. If that's the case, I'll work on fixing that.

You can install it via cab here: http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/ppc/Se ... ay.ARM.CAB

Download/Copy it to your device, install, and enable it from the Today settings applet. There will be an improved installer in the future as well. To uninstall, you'll first have to uncheck it from the today settings applet, then uninstall.

Let me know how it works, and give some suggestions for future versions.

Thanks,

Jon

Upgrading my x50v to WM5 has certainly been an experience. There have been a lot of good suggestions to help improve its usability. One of them involves stopping ActiveSync from starting every 5 minutes by creating a fake server to connect to so you can update the synch schedule.

I wondered how it was restarting every 5 minutes, so I looked in one place I know starts tasks at certain times, and that's in the scheduled task/notifications database. I used a tool from PHM PowerToys and saw two entries for replog.exe which is the ActiveSync service.

One of these two was for this program to begin on Rs232 connect. Rs232 is a serial port, so I knew this was necessary to launch ActiveSync on cradling.

The other was a new one: RunAtRndisFnDetected. I thought maybe this was a source of the constant restarting. So I deleted it. Then I discovered that ActiveSync wouldn't start properly when cradled. Oops.

Rather than hard reset I decided I'd just write a program to restore the proper event. That program can be found here:

http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/ppc/FixASRunAt.zip

You don't need this if you haven't done exactly what I did, but if you're an experimenter like me and accidently did this, I'm putting up this program to avoid a hard reset. The notification is added back when you click OK.

Jon

Did you know PlaylistEditor supports making playlists of streaming files?

Simply click the Add button and instead of browsing to a file, simply type or paste the url of a streaming file (http:// or mms:// for sure, others may work too.)

This way you can make playlists of your favorite online radio stations.


-- EDIT --

Let me be a tad more descriptive about this. If you're saving as M3U or PLS, it doesn't matter what protocol the entry starts with, it will work fine.

ASX will only recognize http:// and mms:// as streams and not prefix the file:// on the front if you are using 1.6 and have the option to prefix with file:// off. Otherwise it will incorrectly try to prepend file:// in front. Let me know if there's a demand for more URL handlers to be supported.

Jon

I've decided to enable user comments, mainly to see if anyone is actually reading.

For some reason the image capcha technique (anti-spam image with numbers thingy) isn't working on this server, so I've made a slight change to the PHP so that it just does the plain text version. At some point, I'll try mixing up the capcha plain text with some new functions. Time to learn some PHP I guess.

So say hi, and feel free to comment on anything you read here, and hopefully the spammers won't overrun us.

Jon

I've been toying with some Astronomical calculations, and have this version of AstronToday for my personal testing.

One thing most people don't see is that I use and work with my applications for a long time often before they see the light of day. Typically I only release them if I find someone who is looking for something like it.

I'm not sure when this will be ready for public consumption, right now it's VGA only, and I'm wondering if its worth making a QVGA version. We'll see.

Jon

I've got an ongoing rant over on PocketPCThoughts talking about the latest Where is My RAM? blog post from the WM Team.

Go check it out at:

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/ ... hp?t=44678

Jon

I was trying out (read: playing) Whirlwind 21 on WM5 when I noticed with every card I was dealt that GSPlayer would stutter in the background. Once through the entire deck and it stopped.

What I believe is happening is that the first time I am displaying a particular card resource image from pegcards.dll its loading it from the flash memory and caching it, causing a considerable delay.

I loaded up solitaire to see if the problem occurred there and I noticed that it took an extra second to start up than I was used to. I bet it preloads all the images to avoid the stutter. I think I will make an updated version that does this as well and hopefully eliminate it.

Jon

I've updated my PPC with WM5 and have proceeded to test all of my applications under it. For the most part there are no problems, so yay for me.

The one exception to this is the modified version of PocketNester I made to better utilize the VGA screen. I based my code on the modifications Emulamer on Aximsite made for PocketSNES, but something isn't quite right under WM5. I intend to investigate.

Another small annoyance is that the distributed version of gsgetfile.dll that several of my programs use in lieu of the default file open dialog is not WM5 compatable. The text shows only as the empty boxes that indicate a font problem (probably a language problem.) The good news is this can be fixed by downloading the latest version of gsgetfile.dll from here. Look for the file named gsgetfile-i.zip (I can't hotlink the file because it's hosted on geocities. bah.)

I'll update the archives with the latest version when I get some time.

Jon