A few thoughts on useability

[RichardKAthena]

Do any developers have some insights on these ideas/issues? I'm considering getting Visual Studio/WM5/6 SDKs and having a go at programming again (yes, it'll be a LONG haul, as I... um... was more familiar with COBOL *cough*) and I'd like to be able to tweak sources and my machine.

Sources, I'm thinking of freeware ports of emulators and the like - my main target being FuseSP. There's a SmartPhone (hence the SP) port that recognises the VGA screen, but doesn't display on it; I want to make emulators work on 640 x 480 devices with keyboards so they simulate old computers rather more accurately - no more onscreen keyboards, pixel-for-pixel or pixel doubled screens instead of odd scaling...

But, without doing any work/research yet, I've seen the same bug a few times on the Athena and Universal. Does HTC implement a wierd way of rotating the screen? Basically CaSTAway and PhoenixStudio (and AudioBox) seem to override a lot of the basic CE appearance in favour of a fullscreen interface - often forced portrait mode - and the touchscreen maps incorrectly to this. It's as if the display is rotated, but the touchscreen isn't.

The same bug seems to affect TCPMP on the Ameo (at least in 0.8.1 Beta, I think I'm going to go back to 0.72 or just get CorePlayer as the subtitles are so limited as to be useless anyway) in that no matter what preferences I have, it starts up in Portrait mode. I never had this issue on my iPaq, which of course defaulted to Portrait anyway but happily rotated to landscape.

The second issue, and third-by-sort-of-connection, is MS Voice Command. I want to add more commands. Specifically, I want it to be able to close the foreground application (so if Media is still running after I've listened to music, I want to be able to issue the equivalent of a long-tap on the close buttong), and I want to be able to connect my Bluetooth headphones without going through the menus.

The way I see it being possible to do this is to make applications that perform these tasks - one that basically does the equivalent of going to "Bluetooth" and setting "Set as Wireless Stereo" on a given device - and invoking those applications with MSVC's "Start" command. Clumsy, but feasible?

I don't see anything to suggest that MSVC is at all extensible. It does what it does when you install it and cannot have abilities added. Which is a real shame - how many of us would like to be able to hook the car kit up, tap the earpiece and say "Start TomTom Navigator" "Navigate to Postcode blahblahblah"...

(Actually, CoPilot used to add a "Navigate to" tab in Contacts - TomTom doesn't seem to have done that, but Google Maps, for what use it is, has added "Show in Google Maps". Being able to say "Navigate to Fredd Bloggs at Work" would be good too).

[lbendlin]

Indeed, the X7500 screen is a Portrait screen (480x640) which is casually forced into landscape by the operating system. You can do performance comparisons, and you will see that the X7500 performs a bit faster in portrait mode.

Voice control within applications is not yet supported (apart from the stock MS stuff). It is also highly unlikely ever to happen, given how the application owners (namely TomTom) are cutting down on developer support - they have discuontinued their SDK.