My Mobiler - view and control your WM Phone from your PC

My Mobiler is an amazing piece of software that lets you view and control your Windows Mobile phone from your desktop PC, using the ActiveSync / USB connection. Installation is a snap : download the software to your PC, connect your phone, and run the application. It copies a .cab to the phone, and you're ready to go.

The really useful part of this software is the ability to capture screen shots and videos. But the cool and fun part is controlling the phone. Response is unbelievably snappy: you click on a button (using your desktop mouse), and the phone event just happens. Or you grab a scroll-bar, in mobile IE, say, and it scrolls! For some reason I'm absurdly impressed by this - but I think you will be, too, if you try it.


It has a number of other features, such as drag/drop files between the phone and the PC, that I haven't tried. But the features I have tried (screen capture, video capture, control) have worked flawlessly.

This is a must-have if you develop mobile applications, or if you want to demo your downloaded mobile software.

My experience with Spb Pocket Plus

Two weeks ago I downloaded and installed Spb Pocket Plus to my T-Mobile Wing running Windows Mobile 6.0. Spb Pocket Plus includes an amazing number of enhancements to the Windows user interface, including:

• a tabbed icon interface for the today page
• a much improved battery indicator
• touch-scrolling in Internet Explorer, Contacts, and a few other applications
• tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer
• very nice widgets for displaying battery status, memory, storage, etc.
• 'plugins' for Windows Media Player, messaging, and more
• additional customizable behavior for the hardware buttons - for example, you can add functions for press/hold on each of the buttons.
  

In all, this is a major improvement to the user interface experience. The today layout is completely customizable: you can select which tabs to show, where they should be displayed (top or side), their size, etc. You can add additional tabs. You can add applications to any tab, and drag/drop applications between tabs.

The tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer is a very handy feature, especially on the (relatively) slow GPRS/Edge network from T-Mobile. You can open tabs in the background while continuing to read the current tabbed page.

Touch scrolling is something else I've wanted for quite a while - ever since seeing the first iPhone. The Spb Pocket Plus implementation is intuitive and easy to use.

Sadly, I had to uninstall this from my phone after about 10 days. It was simply too unstable. I found that I needed to reboot the phone every day because it was out (or nearly out) of memory. Usually the first symptom was that touch scrolling would become erratic, then stop working altogether. Once, the phone would not reboot and I had to use the 'safe mode' thoughtfully provided by Spb. After 2 reboots in safe mode I was finally able to boot in normal mode. Then the next day the phone locked up. I had to hard-reset it, and when it rebooted, all the Spb tabs were gone! After about 15 minutes of trying to recreate them (using the easy-to-use configuration provided by Spb), I decided that it simply wasn't worth it.

I think Spb has an amazing set of products, and it's likely that Spb Pocket Plus works better on other phones. But for me, now, it's just not usable. Your mileage may vary.

Tim O'Reilly posted a long, thoughtful endorsement of Barack Obama. His main points are that Obama is better equipped intellectually and temperamentally to deal with the huge problems we are facing: economic collapse, climate change, economic disparity, lack of governmental transparency, etc.

Unbelievable! Now dems are fighting for the Bush/Paulson plan. Who stands up for the rest of us?

Bernanke says credit crunch extends outside banking industry. But msoft et al are buying back stock with new debt. What gives?