yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Mobile Themes] kenziesgrandma:
Great, thanks for the quick reply.

Kathy
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Thanks very much!! I love the new skins that you created... exactly what I was looking for color and size wise.

One minor issue on the Pro Status Battery. It's off by one number... when the "normal" battery is showing 90%, your new skin shows '10' in the number field. When the normal is at 80%, it shows '9' in the number field.

BTW, love the 'C' when it's charging too!

Still... very, very happy.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Uhm... I guess that could depend on the "weird" handling of the battery widget on mobile shell side: if the widget is made of 10 images + charging it should be 1 image every 10%, but mobile shell shows next image when battery goes below the value... that is, it will display 10 until battery reaches 89% (below 90%)... that's a mobile shell weirdness...

I could add 1 more image, but it would become somehow less reliable for every step would cover 9.09%....
[Windows Mobile Themes] dansia47:
Thanks for new widgets (some requested by me).

Now that your new full library contains all the widgets except pic-sets, can we delete the menubars and weather libraries?
[Windows Mobile Themes] claus1953:
Hello Vostradamus

I love the spbms theme from doc3000, but i would like only a few widgets from it, do you think you could do a clock similar as the one shown here? The one in the 4th picture. I am playing right now with the theme suite mskip freedom, and i would like to set up each one of the different themes differently.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
sure, they're included in the full one :)
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Try asking doc3000 if he's ok with it: if you get his permission I'll extract that clock from his theme and add it to MsM libraries ;)
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
I don't think I explained myself properly... or I'm missing something. I had the "default" Mobile Shell Battery widget my battery showed at 90%. When I changed it to your new skin the number box said 10... which I would assume means 100%. I wasn't sure it something weird was going on, so I added back the default widget and it still showed 90%. I've run 'em both side by side for a bit now and the default always shows different than your new skin.

When the Default went to 80%, your skin went to 9.

When the Default went to 70%, your skin went to 8.

Does that make any more sense?
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Yep it does, and it's still like I wrote before :)

I'll try to explain better:

battery widget has 2 "parts" showing battery level

1) the text percentage (if enabled in the widget definition)

2) the graphics

The text percentage is always accurate 'cause it just display the actual percentage level provided by the system. This is the case of the text part of the standard widget

The graphics work like I explained before. Every image evaluate to a 100% / (number of images). So if the widget graphic file has 10 images, the shown image will change every 10% change in the battery level.

Now, having a 10 images graphic we should see it change at 90%, 80% and so on... BUT... mobile shell (as usual lol) acts weird and changes the graphic NOT when it reaches 90% but when the level goes

below

90%, that is at 89%, 79% and so on (we can all thank spb for this nonsense)

So, why do we have that 10 that does not change to 9 at 90%?

That's because text percentage can only be shown as a percentage, not as a number from 1 to 10, so I had to include the number as part of the graphic, and of course it will change according to the weird graphics handling of mobile shell.

If you try keeping the new battery and the standard one side by side you will notice that as soon as the percentage of the standard one will show 89% the new one will shift to 9.

It would have been better if I had the chance to use the real text, but there's no way I could fit a complete percentage in that small box... so I had no choice but to draw the numbers as part of the graphics :(

I guess we can think of this as another weird design flaw (for I really think it's a flaw) of good ol' spb...

EDIT: forgot to mention... if you default widget text part shows only 90, 80, 70 and not 99, 98, 97 that means the battery driver of your device provides the battery info only with 10% increments... I'm sad to say that's the worst possible scenario if put together with mobile shell weirdness (had the same problem with my previous omnia i900)
[Windows Mobile Themes] claus1953:
Ok, i asked him for permission.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Great, gimme a buzz when he'll reply ;)
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Okay, thanks... I understand perfectly now... or, at least I understand the limitations now. I don't understand why SPB make it that way, but... oh well.

And to make matter worse, my device does only have the 10% increments. So, if I'm understanding correctly, the Mobile Shell _graphic_ will show 90% picture (or '9' in the new widget) until the phone reports a battery reading of less than 90%. And for my phone, it won't report less than 90% until it hits 80%, so... graphically speaking, I'll always be 10% off. :( Am I understanding that correctly?

I'll poke around the forums here a bit and see if anyone made a 1% incremental driver for a Touch Pro2, but my guess is that it won't exists. Once I confirm that such a driver does not exist, you know what my next question is going to be:

Can you create a widget that has number 9-0 instead of 10-1? If I'm understanding correctly then this should show the '9' graphic (The highest number) for me until my phone reports below 90%. For me that happens at 80%, so it should flip to the next graphic... the '8' graphic.

This will be confusing for those people who use this and have a phone that reports on the 1% level of course, so I don't know if you'll be reluctant to do that...
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
One should never doubt the power of XDA!

I'm happy to report that a 1% battery driver DOES indeed exist for the Touch Pro2. It can be found here for anyone else looking for it:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=556318

I did a backup, installed it, reset, and now my phone is reports 67% battery, and the new Pro Status Widget is happily reporting a '7'! Yeah!!

Now, I still think SPB got it wrong. At the very least it should be changed on the 90-80-70-... rather that the <90-<80-<70... mark. Really it should change on the 5's. Show the 9-picture between 94-85, then go to the 8-picture for 84-75%... but what the hey, it's close enough for me as it is and I'm happy.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Great! I'm glad you found a good 1% driver! I found only one for the i900 back then, but could not make it work on my device so I had to live with it :p

Best "other" solution via widget would have been making a graphic file with 11 images, including one with a "0" text... that would have made the steps 100% - 100-9.09, 100-18.18 and so on.... it would have worked quite fine on a 10% driver, but would have been misleading on a proper 1% driver lol :p

Of course there would have been another way... a graphic with 100 images... that could have worked with any driver, but the widget would have been HUGE! lol :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Hmm... so MS automatically divides things up based on how many images are in the file? You shouldn't tell me these things... you're only going to make more work for yourself. What if you did a 20 image Pro-Status skin? (Well, 21 including the 'Charging' image)

Images would be have the numbers like so:

10, 9, 9, 8, 8, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0

If you had this image file, it would flip at 94, 89, 84, 79, 74, 69... Is that correct?

So I'd see 10 until I got below 95%, then I'd see 9 until I got below 85%, etc. This should work for a 10% battery too, shouldn't it? A 10% battery would show the same info that the current widget shows now.

How big of a file would that be? And how many cans of tuna?? :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
lol believe it or not, I knew you would have said this ahahah :D

100% correct :)

20 images would not be too many, the file size would still be acceptable :)

Added to my to-do list for the next release ;)
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Question for you Vostradamus...

When does Mobile Shell pull the information for a picture? Does it just pull it the first time Mobile Shell is run or does it get updated periodically?

The reason I'm asking is I'm wondering about the possibility of creating a pseudo-widget. For instance, say I wanted a little icon that showed what percentage of my Program Storage is used. So, I create 20 images, each of which displays a different percentage 5%, 10%, 15%, etc.

The next step would be to create a little background program that checks the memory every 15 minutes or so. The program would then make a copy of the appropriate percentage picture and paste it into the directory with the name of percent.jpg (for example). This way every 15 minutes, in that directory, there would be a picture call percent.jpg that would show the percent of the memory available.

Then, of course, the user would add a picture to a panel in Mobile Shell that would show that percent.jpg picture.

Now, IF Mobile Shell at times updates images, then this would work as a semi-widget to show system information. Of course, if Mobile Shell only updates pictures when it first launches then this won't work at all.

Any idea if MS updates images? And if so, how often?

Thanks.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Uhm.... I'm not really sure about this, but it could happen at startup or, in the case the picture was on an additional panel, the moment you first access the panel. Mind that I'm not sure, I'm taking a guess here... :p

Wouldn't it be easier to take those images and just use them to build a battery widget? :confused:
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
I'm thinking that if MS updates that image on a semi-regular basis (or could be made to do so) that this would be a way to create new classes of widgets... to have a way to create a widget that does something totally different than what MS can currently do.

For example, a memory widget that would show what percentage of memory is being used.

Or a "tasks" status widget that would show how many unfinished tasks are user had.

Obviously these wouldn't be "real" widgets in that MS is not handling how the info that is updated. But by having a third party program continuously updating a picture and (hopefully?) MS reloading that picture regularly the user would be shown current data.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Right, didn't think about it, I thought you were only talking about battery lol :p

I'll run a little test on the emulator, adding a picture and changing its pointing in the registry... if mobile shell will change the pic after a while without me restarting it, then it will mean that the image has been refreshed :)
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
I figure it's a long shot, but maybe it might work...

I don't really have enough programing experience to know what's all involved. I haven't done any real programming for probably about a decade, and then it was only in Visual Basic! :)

It just hit me that it might be a way to add to the widget pool without spb giving us an SDK. It seems like 5.0 is probably a long way off and even then I'm sure it will be limited as well.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
no luck, I'm afraid :(

It's been more than 1 hour since when I changed the pointed pic, and still nothing... I've been running pretty much any app I can on the emu in the meantime, changed page, opened and closed panels and so on... and still no refresh.... looks like the image is just loaded at startup.
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Ah well... it was a thought anyway. Not that I need a whole lot more, but I know there are some people who want other widgets and thought this might be a creative way to do something.

On a side note, I'm know you have on your to-do list a 21 image pro-status battery. How hard would it be to tweak that the picture slightly? It looks like the bottom and the lower half of the right side of the number box has a faint white boarder. It's minor, but it is visible. (See attached screen shot) If it's a real pain to fix than don't worry about it. For the majority of people I'm sure it won't matter, but I happen to have an pitch black background and so it shows up a little.

On a side, side note, does anyone know which spb apps add widgets to mobile shell? I know that Time does add the following widgets:

City Time

Local Time

Moon Phase

Next Alarm

Stop Watch

I'm pretty sure that wallet and Backup do NOT add any widgets.

Edit: Oops... forgot to attach the pic. I've done that now. Looking at it closely, it looks like it might be a shadow effect around the box??
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
lol my bad that I didn't notice it :p it's definitely a shadow, it's present in the original ones too, only difference is that the original status pro images have a black outline around the box which creates the black shadow... I kept the shadow transparency in the image mask, but left the outline of the box white, so the shadow turns out white instead of black (and of course you don't see the black one 'cause your wallpaper is black too, it's visible only white or very light wallpapers) :p

Will fix it in the 5% version ;)

About apps adding wigets, I think there should be one adding some rss feed widget, but I don't remember which one it is :p
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
The SPB Wireless Manager adds a text only widget that shows the use of bandwidth and SPB Weather adds an additional weather widget.
[Windows Mobile Themes] mskip:
Spb News adds an RSS Feed widget which is quite good if you want RSS Feed directly on your screen.

Mark.
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
We discussed during the work on the changing pics that I tested around for hours to reload pics "on-the-fly" without restarting the shell. I used a lot of different widgets and changed the dat-files after MS-Launch and MS wasn't impressed at all. For changing any of the graphics, you either have to trigger that change via program like MS does with DClock or Weather (which isn't possible for us for the well-known reasons) or restart the shell.

Even if the script that the user suggested would see a change of any variable and changed the pic, it would have also have to trigger a shell-restart, which would surely be possible, but could be very unnerving, if it happened every some minutes or if the user is in the midst of writing a lengthy email :p
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
So... in short... it's technically speaking possible, but practically speaking unworkable... too much interruption...

Oh well, something fun to think about at least.
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
Exactly. That's why we made the changing pics only change every 24 hours. It would have been possible to change every 5 minutes like a Windows background changer, but you'd have phone that would be in a constant shell restart :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
lol this proves that I really need some days off at work: I completely forgot that we already tested it over and over for the changing pics :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Sorry to continue to "pollute" your thread with questions about Mobile Shell that aren't directly related to your work, but this thread seems to be visited regularly by the people who know the most about Mobile Shell... and seeing as spbclub.com seems to have disappeared, this is the best source for info. So.....

Has anyone ever found away to have the weather city update based on location? I know that the newer version of sense do this, just wondering if Mobile Shell could.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
lol spbclub has never been a too great source of info, or at least info from spb guys.... you can get to know something on there from time to time, only it will most probably be from another user rather than someone from the staff :p

Oh, but they do reply sometimes.... mainly when the answer is "unfortunately, that's not currently supported by mobile shell" lol :D

<spb staff mode> unfortunately, that's not currently supported by mobile shell </spb staff mode>

lol am I ready to work for them or what? :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] mskip:
They certainly need some input from other sources as they dont seem that keen on giving people what they actually want.

My guess for Spb Mobile Shell 5 is NO developer kit for people to create new widgets, NO new widgets (apart from the 'pretty' 3D ones that are on the youtube vids, NO proper facebook widget, NO proper Twitter widget, NO proper integration of sms/emails such as is available on Android, NO real inovation of any kind (selectable screens or user configurable menubar buttons) and NO decent backup/restore funtion. Im sure I missed a couple of dozen other things but im fed up now lol.

If they got it right and listened to what people ask for then Mobile Shell could beat anything else hands down. They dont bother because they know other people will do all the hard work after they bring it out. If they didnt want anyone to modify it then why havent they changed the password to the dat files since mobile shell was first released lol.

Ok rant over sorry about that :)

Mark.
[Windows Mobile Themes] citizenb:
roflmao! :D So true.

Other than here, which is by far the most comprehensive source of info about how mobileshell works, second on my list is a site which is only in Chinese that talks about some of the widget structures - I spent a few hours going through it with Google translator and picked up some useful info :)

Spbclub is the best place to find out what people wish it could do :p

The more time I spend getting into the skins the more I suspect that these widgets were coded be several different people who weren't actually talking to each other.
[Windows Mobile Themes] mskip:
Ya think? Case in point is there actually a country that has the hour hand INFRONT of the minute hand on an analogue clock or is that just a total boob on spb's part.

Mark.
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
Most probably 'cause it would have taken about 3 microseconds to discover the new one lol :D

Please, feel free to go on.... I quote pretty much

everything

and I'm quite confident that a good 85% of spbclub do the same (of course except for the fanboys always defending the undefendable) :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] Vostradamus:
I really hope that's the case... it would have taken a

very large

amount of dumbness for a team of developers actually talking to each other to make some choices I found out in the registry handling... for example the logical index number of the pages of a panel being handled differently between pro pages and lifestyle pages..... how to make an easy thing complicated and error-prone in one single step lol :D
[Windows Mobile Themes] citizenb:
Well honestly just the whole concept of Pro Panes and Lifestyle panes itself is a huge flaw imho. Why couldn't they have just made generic panes with independent backgrounds and allowed people to determine the position of the panes relative to each other, like you can with multiple monitors, or a dualboxing app like synergy 'pane a is left of pane b, pane c is above pane a etc'
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
SPBClub has surely not dissapeared. Under

http://www.spbclub.com/forum/index.php

you can still reach it.

And it still sux like it always did. :D

It's a fanboy party-zone, where "Experts" that have no clue whatsoever are defending the worst possible realization of a wonderful idea that has ever left a software-company.
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
My Guess is: NO Mobile shell 5 in the near future. Isn't it funny that they release 3.5.x for each and any platform in the last weeks? Why do that when the new version is ante portas?
[Windows Mobile Themes] mskip:
I was a bit concerned about that too especially when they announced at the World Mobile Congress that Mobile Shell 5 would be released in Q2-Q3 2010 which isnt leaving much time. Maybe they are just prepping everybody to get the interest in other platforms before 5 comes out ;)

Im thinking a beta will be released around August and it wont go final until the end of the year.

One thing I noticed on a youtube vid I just watched is that there is a page selector bar at the bottom, which I know I and others have already done but at least it should be easier to integrate new MenuBars when I can start ripping it apart :D

Mark.
[Windows Mobile Themes] mskip:
Because why go to all the effort of changing the whole structure of the screens when they know 'most' of the people who use it will play with it quite happily without question. What you propose, while certainly being the best way of doing it would require basic intelligence on the users part. Not saying another word :p

Mark.
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
I absolutely LOVE synergy... The problem is that when I get home I miss my four monitors! :( It almost makes me want to go to work!

As others have stated, I think spb is really thinking: Keep It Simple Stupid. They think: The more complex Mobile Shell is, the less "user friendly" it becomes and the masses will reject it as an application.

The fundamental flaw here is that a program CAN be both complex and easy to use. For instance, my wife and I both use Word regularly. She probably using 5-10% of the features it has. I tend to use more like 40-50%. Other people might use closer to 90%. But just because it has the power and features to keep that 90% user happy doesn't mean that my wife, a 10% user, still can't do what she needs it to do without getting lost to the advanced features.

Setup Mobile Shell with the full feature set, and then lock down many of the advanced features in a separate area called "Advanced." The basic user can then use it in a "stock" manner while those of us who WANT more power can open up the full feature set.
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
Interesting... I'm using Chrome and for the past number of weeks when I go there I get a 400 - bad request error. I just assumed it was down.

Just tried it with IE and I get it. Weird.
[Windows Mobile Themes] RedRamage:
I think you're 100% right... furthermore, I think 5.0 will not be released for WM6.5.
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
Thats the evil google empire ;)

It does not want you to be enlighted by SPB as long as they have not finished MS for Android :D.
[Windows Mobile Themes] jotha:
For which Windows else?

WM7 will not allow Shell replacement anymore (this is confirmed), so there will be no MS for WM7, thats rather sure.

So if Spb wants to stay in the WinMobile-Market, MS5 must run on WM 6.5.

But that may be one of the reasons why it has not surfaced yet. I think Spb is trying hard to find a way to earn money with Mobile Shell also in the future. Knowing that they will be in trouble on the Microsoft-Platform, they spread out to Android, Symbian and iPhone. As the iPhone surely also is not a platform where shell-replacement is possible, that leaves them only with Android and Symbian. Whether those 2 are enough to carry the development may not yet be decided, thus the delay (just my assumption, but makes sense, at least to me)