TamsPPC – the PocketPC Blog

Don’t get me wrong – Opera Mobile is a very good browser once you get the way it works. In fact, I do most of the updating of the Tamoggemon Content Network with my X1 currently as my laptop is down.

However, I frequently run into errors like the one shown below:

In fact, Opera Mobile pops it up every time it comes across a web site which doesn’t conform to its rather strict syntax validation rules. OK, a single click can dismiss it most of the time…but it nevertheless is extremely annoying.

The reason why I post about this is different, though: Opera’s syntax naziness is utterly futile. With a total market share of less than 10 percent, web masters can afford to simply ignore Opera users rather than invest large amounts of money into redesigning their web sites.

Users who see the message above thus have but two options: suck it up or change browsers. The wrath of affected individuals will be directed at Opera rather than at the web site (hey, it works in PocketIE)…thereby harming Opera further.

What do you think?

Don’t ask me why a presentation on user interface design made it into the IEEE proceedings schedule of the FH Hagenberg’s NFC Congress. Nevertheless, being the UI fetishist I am, Alice Moroni’s presentation struck my interest. Enjoy:

Alice started out by presenting a few cases of extremely bad design:

According to her, catastrophes like the ones above are caused by a wrong approach to design – it does not consider the user:

The solution is called user-centric design…which means putting the user at the center of the development process:

Understanding users can be difficult – the slide below presents an overview of users needs:

Prototypes are very useful when it comes to figuring out how users “tick”:

Unfortunately, user tests are not easy. Their experience showed them that users should not be given too many tasks at a time (among other things):

Users must be monitored discreetly, as their behavior changes the moment they feel monitored:

Point-of-view cameras can be useful:

Alternatively, a screencast solution can be used:

When it comes to determining the users, a surprising thing pops up: 5 users are usually enough to find 85% of all eekers; whereas 15 are likely to find all of them according to J Nielsen:

The next surprise: advanced users loathed their simple application. Some missed core features, while others felt that the program was “too lowly” for their taste:

Most books on design patterns and/or application architecture are insanely expensive and not particularly well-suited to the demands of mobile application developers.

Fortunately for us, Microsoft’s patterns & practices group has just released a freely-downloadable ebook called “Rich Client Architecture Pocket Guide”. The 1MB PDF file looks at all things mobile – if you feel like giving it a spin, hit the URL below!

Rich Client Architecture Pocket Guide

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Andyindia

A thread on PocketNow.com comparing the home screen of various versions of the Windows Mobile UI have made me think about what really disturbs me about Windows Mobile. After quite a bit of thinking,. I think that I have found my culprit…it’s the annoying top and bottom toolbars which IMHO are way to wide(especially in landscape mode):

If the image above wouldn’t be so sad, one could laugh about it for hours. A spreadsheet cell is tinner than the bottom toolbar, and the same is valid for the bottom one.

My personal request to the Windows Mobile team can be expressed easily – but the toolbar size by half. They are still tappable(case frames aid inaccurate users) – and we could get a nice extra bit of information on-screen!

The lack of a color picker dialog in the .NET CF(yes, the desktop framework has a ColorPicker class – but .NET CF doesn’t contain it) has annoyed hell out of me for quite some time – even the 10yr old Palm OS contains a well-done color picker. Anyways, problems are here to be solved – please allow me to present you my own ColorPicker(running in .NET CF 2.0 on a hp rx4240, blots are due to GIF compression):

Using this is very simple – just download the form file here and integrate it into your project like you would do with any other form.

Then, do the following to make the user pick a color:

Dim colorX as color
colorX = ColorPicker.getcolor()


Feel free to do with this code whatever you feel like. However, no warranties are given on anything….and posting a link to an app that uses it always is appreciated!

I am in a pretty bad mood about this…please forgive me the slightly aggressive slant

I am a programmer who takes pride in designing his UI’s himself – and indeed, many of my Palm OS applications have won awards for simple and well-done interfacing. For me, popping up a dialog over another form is a standard issue – it looks like this on a Palm:

The code for doing this is approx 1 line long; and all you need to do is set the form dimensions and popup styles in Resource XML.

Creating such a dialog is next to impossible on the PocketPC in vb.net – for some strange reason, this absolutely operating system insists on making each and every form “full-screen” – even if you set the dimensions differently(even explicitly in code). All this while a MessageBox floats around the screen merrily…

However, I am not alone with this problem. Looking around in the CF newsgroup brought along the following gem of a thread:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework&tid=57f3a71b-7166-4b7b-98d6-003453f86c7c&p=1

Essentially, it all comes down to setting FormBorderStyle to none. You then have a form that doesn’t get resized automatically and can be popped up with Form.ShowDialog – but it doesn’t have a frame or title area.

Fabien Decret has a writeup on the “gory details” and also covers creating a simple border around the form – visit his blog here:
http://fabdecret.blogspot.com/2007/05/non-full-screen-window.html

How do you create a popup window in .net CF? If you have an idea, please email it to me at Tamog AT gmx DOT at!