[Wing, P4350 ROM development] quicksite:
Question about FingerKeyboard, Skins, and JustStable

Hey Ivan, nice seeing you swimming around these waters... Coincidentally I just ran into a "fingerboard related" problem with JustStable... but it's more of a user-error thing. But for the sake of it, let me describe, because maybe you have a suggestion, or a theory:

In the "JustStable" lifecycle, I have probably flashed about 8 versions. About a month ago I finally flashed the final version you made, and it's been superb. Prior to that, it was maybe 5 versions before the final, and it too was great. The big difference in my usage of the ROM is that previously I had always installed PCM Keyboard, just out of habit, and because the first time I saw FingerKeyboard, I didn't have time to learn something new, like where all the key variations were, and how to copy/paste.

But after I flashed to the final version I think I asked you why you used FingerKeyboard, and you said something about it being newer and for most people better than PCMkeyboard. So I decided to use it... and finally took the time to look at the instructions, how copy/paste works, etc -- and immediately found out bow much better it is! But there was one thing: I wanted to try a different skin... and that's the subject of this post.

I quickly noted that in your cooked ROM there was just the default black/blue you chose, which was fine but I'd wanted to try the grey/blue. I looked around and saw I had to load a whole cab of a QVGA version in order to get more skin options; so no problem. But after installing the cab and restarting, I would get an error at each restart something like "error, couldn't find correct skin file" ... And I am pretty sure this would just create an endless loop I could never get out of even with a soft-reset.

Somehow I was able to interrupt that looping, and finally uninstalled the cab I had installed, figuring there was a conflict somewhere with whatever the cooked ROM was looking for.

Thereafter all was fine as I used the built-in ROM, and really got to like FingerKeyboard a lot... I would never go back to PCM keyboard which seems obsolete by comparison.

But then just the other day I did a spectacularly stupid thing: While I was checking out various XDA threads on skinning various apps, I came across another FingerKeyboard skin i wanted to just try. And I ended up doing the exact same thing... really dumb. I installed a new cab, opened the configurator, selected a different skin, and I believe it then says "chnages take place after a reset"... And then the same thing happened: Upon soft-resetting, when the rom started up the WM software, I hit that same error message as before: "Error (parsing?) skin file. Wrong resolution" or something like this.

But this time I could not recover. It was stuck on this error, and then every time I reset, i went into that dreaded bootup problem where I see the opening "HTC" logo, but the device never proceeds past this, and it's stuck in this mode. Yesterday and last night I spent I would say 15 hours, trying everything I possibly could to try to interrupt this stuck-bootup cycling problem, so that I could get Windows to resolve loading, then I could uninstall that cab and never try that again. I did everything: booted with the SD card out, with it in; then with it in, then pulling it out, and reinserting it... opening up the back taking out the SIM card and rebooting... (same stuck cycle!), then taking out the battery; same thing after I placed battery back in and powered up... Then took the battery out for 15 minutes, tried again... same. Then I tried to get an active sync connection, or at least use the USB cable connected to PC. No active sync could be established... No matter what I did it stayed in perpetual cyling of HTC logo, never getting past that... I ran active sync diagnostics, troubleshooting, tried different USB cables; then I went to the boards searching for people with this problem.

I read all these various "tricks" people have supposedly used to break out of this boot stuck-cycle... threads from 2007 were saying "hold the red END CALL button during the whole restart process"... nope...

And at the end of the 15 hours of trying I realized the fate ahead... that I would have to hard-reset.

I have not yet done that... and figured that, given the timing of your posting here, I'd at least ask you here "can you think of anything else?" before hard reset?

The reason the hard-reset is so dreaded in this case is that, in addition to a ton of registry tweeks I'd made for fonts and sizes and weights (all of which I've written down, so no problem to re-create these) to optimize a finger-friendly menu system for windows 6.1, this time I'd spent weeks adjusting the whole UI color scheme... using the great utility "UI Tweeks" ... There are probably 50-75 chnages here I'd made, which required a tremendous trial & error process of adjusting colors -- then resetting -- then analyzing how the color scheme worked for all aspects of the WM interface -- settings screens, dialog boxes, dimmed text, highlighted text -- everything.

I documented some of these by using screenshots to capture the Red, Green, Blue settings... but not all.

Anyway -- I am prepared to start over and hopefully remember the general target ranges of where each color value was set, and reconstruct the whole interface, which I was really really happy with... (I'd tested it in daylight, at night, with glare, no glare, on the dashboard in my car -- all to optimize the readability of choices that were now often in larger font sizes than default windows (crappy) UI.) I was just getting ready to publish all of this with a series of videos... because I contend that these variations combine to make, pound for pound, a better user experience than windows 6.5 in terms of finger-friendly navigation ---- until the actual new WM 7 premieres in 6 months or so with what we all hope will be a 100% finger-friendly interface.

So, sorry for the long-winded post. But it's worth it to me to at least run this past you to see if there is any last ditch effort I can use to boot my phone without resorting to hard reset. I suspect the answer is "hard reset", and that's okay, but at least I'd know i exhausted all remedies beforehand.

thank you,

quicksite