After some final coding last night, I finally finished the new feature for SynCE-KPM: viewing the registry of your device via SynCE-KPM.

Currently, the feature is only available in the SVN version of SynCE-KPM (which depends on the SVN version of librapi2). However, we are currently thinking about releasing the 0.15 version of SynCE, which would contain this new feature. As soon as more information about the new release is available, you will also see that on my website.

To show the new feature in this version, I decided to create another screencast. While the previous screencast did show a lot, it was relatively boring due to the fact that there was no sound at all. Therefore, I decided to add a voice over to this new screencast, explaining everything in a bit more detail. In the screencast I do not show all features related to the syncing part (via sync-engine) again, because this takes quite some time and this has already been shown in my previous screencast. In the current screencast, sync-engine is not running and only the device management capabilities of SynCE-KPM are shown.

The screencast:

Of course, you can still view the old screencast if you would like to see the display the status of an ongoing sync-process, or installing a CAB file onto your device. This old screencast is in the Lost screencast post on my website. Please note, that this old screencast is without any sound.

When you have the feature of viewing the contents of the registry, of course the next question is to be able to edit the contents of the registry. This is what I see as the next feature to implement in SynCE-KPM, though at the moment I don’t know when I will have time for this. As with this currently implemented new feature, whenever I have time, I will start working on it

If you have any questions, suggestions, etc, please leave a post or send me an email.

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:

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

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… )

For the new feature of SynCE-KPM I am working on at the moment, I want to emulate the look and feel of the windows standard program regedit.exe. This means showing the user a QTreeView showing the hierarchy of the keys and a QListView on the right showing all values within the selected key.

While the other day I have been working (and finished) on the librapi2 stuff, in particular the python bindings, to facilitate a registry editor, for some days I have been looking at this whole QTreeView stuff. I have to say that I really do appreciate the idea behind MVC, but I have to say that to use this in a nice way in PyQt is really difficult. After some days I am now at least able to create a nice QTreeView based on a model that represents the registry. Currently, everything is still hardcoded, but at least I can see a structure now (the QListView with values will come much later ).

Next step is to see if I can connect the model to the actual contents of the registry on the device in a dynamic way. The problem is that I need to fetch new data from the registry only when it is needed. One simple approach is to first read the complete registry into the model and then show this to the user. However, I don’t think users will like it if there is a 5 minute delay showing “Fetching data” when going to the registry editor before they can actually use the registry editor. This means I will have to fetch data in some asynchronous way. Fortunately, I already have some ideas about this. For some reason I think this fetching part is again the easy component….. Don’t want to think about all the mess that is involved to show this in a nice way to the end-user.

For the moment just happy that at least the very basics of the left-hand side of the future screen (i.e. the hierarchy of the keys) needed to display actual data are there. Onwards to new challenges with PyQt and its MVC

Now that the moving is almost finished and I have a bit of spare time again, I would like to work a bit more on implementing new things for SynCE-KPM. A lot of people have asked me in the beginning to create a file-browser within SynCE-KPM, though I think that programs like Nautilus are far more suited for this purpose. I have had some ideas about this, and although I am not very much in favor of this, there might still be possibilities to implement this.

One thing I am looking at right now is a remote registry editor within SynCE-KPM that allows you to edit the registry of your device. For this to work I first have to add some additional functionality to the python bindings of the RAPI2 library, which I am working on right now. One of the things I would like to implement is a registry key rename function: Unfortunately, by design you cannot just change a key name; to rename a registry key you must first copy the whole key recursively to the new name and then delete the old key. If somebody does know a better way for doing this for Windows Mobile devices via RAPI, please let me know, really interested in this.

When all the work on the python bindings of librapi2 is finished, I can start working on the QTreeView/QListView stuff that must be added to SynCE-KPM. At the moment really reading into everything that is needed to be able to show the end-user a nice view of the registry on the device.

If you have any other ideas that could be nice additions for SynCE-KPM, please let me know via a comment.

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 !:)