[Windows Phone 7 General] schaps:
Hello there,

Although I didn't come back here for years, I suppose most of you heard about my work and contribution to WP7 homebrew. I've been contacted by Justin who informed me about his nice gift to homebrew devs and asked me to reply here, that's also an opportunity to introduce myself, to get in touch with homebrew developers and to give you some good news!

For those of you who don't know me, I developed some popular homebrews such as Advanced Configuration Tool, TouchXplorer, Registry Editor, Quick Settings, TouchXperience & Windows Phone Device Manager. In the past I've contributed a lot on XDA-Devs forums, I started up making custom ROMs for our good old WinMo, I published various hacks & mods and then I developed many free apps. Actually most of my WP7 apps already existed on WinMo, f.e. Advanced Config that got million downloads, and TouchXperience that was an ambitious project on which I spent thousands hours, at first it was an alternative UI exclusive to my ROMs, then it became a fully customizable & hardware-accelerated UI for WinMo, and it is now the companion of WP Device Manager! By the way I released new versions of WP Device Manager & TouchXperience for Windows Phone 7.5: http://www.touchxperience.com/.

Those who know me know I am a hard worker, I am curious so I like to disassemble things to understand how they work and how I can reuse or improve them. I have also some good references in hacking: I exploited the weakness of HTC drivers to get full access to file system and registry, then some devs helped me to use similar hacks for other manufacturers, I was the first who managed to take screenshots, to create shortcuts, custom tiles, custom alerts & ringtones, and I worked on a reliable jailbreak for WP7 (till Microsoft asked me not to release it, and now is ineffective since Mango). I've done quite some progress on homebrew, unfortunately I did not have time yet to release new projects, I was actually busy working on a huge and exciting project that will be revealed soon (concerning Windows Phone as well), but I'm now back in homebrew developments!

I love challenges, and the project I am currently working on will be the best example! I hope I could do on Nokia as much as I've done on HTC phones regarding hacks and other findings, I'm convinced there are great possibilities for homebrews with Nokia since they put a lot of native software in WP7, and there are certainly many secrets to reveal. The last versions of WP Device Manager and TouchXperience already work on Nokia phones, but I hope to make soon TouchXplorer, Advanced Config and Registry Editor working on Nokia too, for that I would need to find some exploits and without a physical device it's nearly impossible.

My goal is to provide tools for anyone who wants to unleash the full potential of his device, also like WP Device Manager, to show what I and many end users expected from Microsoft, there should be an open way for homebrew without compromising OS integrity.

I also wanted to tell homebrew devs that even though I use to work on my side I'm open to join our efforts if it can push homebrew further.

Thanks again Justin for your nice contribution, it seems that none of the good devs here currently own a Nokia so it will be for sure beneficial to homebrew community!