I noticed that on my windows computer, Windows Mobile Device Center was able to show a picture of my device. I was always wondering where this information [...]]]> Even though I was not feeling well today (spent day sick at home, having cold shivers all the time…), I did look into one small new feature for SynCE-KPM.

I noticed that on my windows computer, Windows Mobile Device Center was able to show a picture of my device. I was always wondering where this information was taken from. Turns out that this picture is actually taken from the device itself. I guess it must be something prescribed by ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center to have the image /windows/sync.ico present.

After the device is connected, SynCE-KPM will now look if that file exists, and if it does, obtain it and show it to the user in the main window.

Example screen with two different phones I have:

SynCE-KPM now shows device (example 1)

SynCE-KPM now shows device (example 2, my HTC HD2)

I still have the major new feature left: implementing the remote registry editor. This is still on my TODO list, but unfortunately I don’t have as much spare time as I would like to have to work on this.

Another thing that I need to work on with SynCE-KPM is the usage of layout managers instead of not being able to resize as with the current implementation. Will take me some time also. Will get there though, slowly

However, as you [...]]]> After the previous post I started working on integrating the stand-alone prototype within SynCE-KPM. As mentioned, at the moment I only have a view on the keys, not yet the values. Furthermore, at the moment there is no error checking, switching a device will not work, and some other minor things

However, as you can see from the screencast

it is already possible to view all the registry keys that are present in the registry. Also, from the screencast you can see the Fetching… node that is shown to the user whenever the actual data is being queried for the first time. It can also be clearly seen that the fetching is done in a separate thread, not related to the GUI thread, because even while fetching, the GUI still is responsive. Any further requests for fetching the user does, are just queued to the dataserver, which will retrieve them in the order they were requested.

I have already thought about how to incorporate the values and I have come up with a solution that uses the current registry and registry key objects, but with a different model. This means I will have to custom models, both subclasses of QAbstractItemModel, using the same underlying data, but only the parts they need.

One thhings I still need to do is determining what to do with updates (i.e. when to refetch keys, when being clicked on, or have the user explicitly request refetch). Also some GUI things need to be changed. At the moment it appears that the current window width of synce-kpm is not enough for a registry editor, might have to make the application a little bit wider. All in all, plenty of things to be done (and sooooo little time… )

Unfortunately I did not have a lot of time to do this earlier, first of all my time was taken completely by finishing up on my thesis and getting all the details right. After that there was [...]]]> Although it has been released for some time already, finally there is the message on my blog

Unfortunately I did not have a lot of time to do this earlier, first of all my time was taken completely by finishing up on my thesis and getting all the details right. After that there was a servercrash at my hosting provider and after that I went on vacation.

The main improvements with SynCE-KPM 0.12 are that some bugs have been fixed and that SynCE-HAL is now supported. This synce-hal is a new connection manager that is intented to replace odccm. The main advantage of synce-hal over odccm is that we do not longer require a separate daemon running (odccm) in the background, but everything is taken care of by HAL. The moment a device is plugged in, HAL will make fire up the needed stuff. Another advantage of SynCE-HAL is that it also is able to work transparently with the legacy way of connecting (i.e. PPP over USB) and that bluetooth is working also (though I don’t know about whether this feature is enabled in the packaged version of synce-hal, I did have it working when running the SVN version of it some time ago).

When people have new ideas of things that can be added to future versions of SynCE-KPM, please let me know and I will see what I can do to implement these wishes. One thing that is still on my own wish list is to implement a remote registry editor. For this I will have to put some more time in pyqt though