Caffeinated Bytes

Facebook Application for Windows Mobile

2009-04-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

This is hand down the best freeware Facebook application available. It works very well and seems to allow you to do much more than most of the other 'free' Facebook applications. There are 5 Differnt Tabs that allow you to do the following:

Home - Where you can view your News Feed, Status Updates, and Updated Photos
Profile - Where you can view yours and others Wall, Info, & Photos
Friend - Graphical/Text list of all your friends & what they are doing
Inbox - Here you can view your Inbox, Outbox, Notifications, and Requests
Phonebook - This is a really cool feature where you can call any of your friends that have there phone numbers linked to there FB Profile.

This application cannot be installed on to the storage card and is only working on Windows 6.5 Rom, but this WILL run on windows 6.1, 6.0 but other than that it works great. If you would like to down load the application just visit the developers web site: Link

Google SMS

2009-03-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to find something out that you normally would Google but you either don't have a data connection or a data plan? Now you can use Google’s SMS service (for free). Text your question to 466453 and they will text message you back with the results. For instance, say you are in a city that you are not familiar with and want to find a place to eat that serves sushi. Just text 'Sushi and the name of the city and state' to the above number and you will get some listing (if there are any sushi shops near where you are at).

Google Sync: Now Sync Google with Outlook on your mobile device.

2009-02-14T08:20:00.000-08:00

If you use Google's Gmail as your primary mail and use their calendar as well to organize your life, there use to be no easy to sync that info to your windows mobile device unless you purchased a third party application like OggSync. But that has now all changed because of a new offering by Google called Google Sync. It’s free on all major mobile platforms and its quite easy to setup. Just follow the instructions here:

Google Sync

This new application will allow you to sync you calendar AND contacts on your mobile device with your Google account. I have been running it for a couple of days now and it works awesome on my AT&T Tilt running windows mobile 6.

iContact: A simple contacts applications

2009-01-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

iContacts is one of my favorite 'Free' windows mobile application, a definite a must have on your mobile phone. It's basically a simple finger friendly contacts applications for your Windows Mobile device which will help you scroll your contact list in iPhone style by sliding down your finger in the screen. It also allows you to search for contacts with a pop up letter menu and save certain ones in a favorites list, see screen shots below. To download the latest version of this application just visit the developers web site:

Skybook: Facebook for Windows Mobile

2009-01-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for a great windows mobile Facebook interface SkyBook is the ticket. It installs very easy and allows you to update and view all your Facebook friends, upload pictures and reply back to messages plus much more. Its light weight and work fairly quickly (although that depends on your data connection). I have been using this on my AT&T Tilt and have not had any issue to report of. To download this application, just visit to the SkyBook site. Just make sure to follow the directions here so that you are able to use this. You do have to allow access to your account from the SkyBook application.

Zed Graph: A .Net Graphing Application

2009-01-11T07:17:00.001-08:00

If you have ever been looking for an easy way to draw nice looking graphs in a .Net Application, then look no more. ZedGraph is a ‘FREE’ charting class library with a high degree of configurability that is also easy to use and best of all did I mention its ‘FREE’. ZedGraph is written in C# and is great for creating 2D line and bar graphs. All you have to do is pass a dataset into ZedGraph and let it do its thing. The classes provide a high degree of flexibility and almost every part of the generated graph can be user-modified. We have been using this for a while and it’s amazing how fast it works. On one application I wrote, we have a multiple threads running to collect and graph data. One thread collects data at 2 millisecond intervals for 5 minutes. In a second thread I have the graph created by ZedGraph being updated every 1 second with this data and it has no problems keeping up an redrawing the screen. I high recommend this Application if you are looking for an application to display graphs on a .Net created application.

To download ZedGraph just visit their site.

G-Alarm: Reliable and Powerful alarm clock

2009-01-11T04:30:00.000-08:00

G-Alarm is a very reliable and featured filled 'FREE' alarm clock for your windows mobile phone. It is far superior to the standard alarm that comes with Windows Mobile. With G-Alarm you can define unlimited alarms of different types and you can set your own music files to wake you up (U2 and Johnny Cash for me). It accepts several different types of file formats plus you can customize the look of G-Alarm by downloading many different skins. Now I don't use this function but G-Alarm also has the option to force you to complete a maze or solve a calculation before you can snooze or turn the alarm off for those of you with snooze button issues. I highly recommend this application if you use the alarm feature on your phone.

Cool Feature Offered By G-Alarm:

Skinnable GUI (Lots of skins are available on their site).
A today screen plugin which shows you all your alarms and lets you activate or deactivate them with one click.
Define unlimited alarms with many options.
Choose between different alarm types. You can have weekday alarms where you select which days of the week an alarm should go off. Quick alarms, that go off once and then is deleted. And you can also set up alarm patterns (e.g. play the alarm every 4th week on Monday at 6:00 AM).
Define play lists with unlimited mp3/wma/wav files for each alarm.
Supports all resolutions (VGA, QVGA, WVGA, WQVGA, etc.)
Support many different music file formats mp3, wma, wav, ogg, mp4, aac
You can decide whether you want to complete mazes before you can snooze or stop the alarm or not.
See your next alarm in S2U2, TouchFlo3D, Manila2D and others.

To Download visit the G-Alarm Site. You can also download the skins (mentioned above) from here as well.

Plinky

2009-01-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

A new web site is going to launch soon called Plinky.com. The company was started by Jason Shellen who formally was at Google. According to the Plinky web site they are 'working on a fun social media application'. You can follow there progress on their blog or go to their web site and sign up for news alerts about the site.

Wii Game Review: Resident Evil, The Umbrella Chronicles

2009-01-07T18:59:00.000-08:00

The kids got a Wii for Christmas and a ton of games. I decided to go out and get a game for myself, since my XBox 360 is in the shop (for the fourth time). Anyways, I happen to be at a Toy R Us with the kids and did something I normally don’t do; I purchased a game on a whim (sorry Game Stop, but we had gift cards). I purchased ‘Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles’. At first I thought the game was not too bad but the more I played it, the more my opinion of the game degraded. The three main things I did not like about the game were the way the controls worked, the lack of ability to explore the map and the lack of ability to retreat from a battle. The controls have some good points, I liked the slashing motion of the controller to make the knife work but I hate the fact that you have to actually be pointing the Wii remote at the screen and maneuver the cross hairs around to hit an opponent. When you are fighting one the big creatures, its gets real old real quick as you have to hold the controller pointed at the screen shooting them (sometimes it seems like forever). Another thing I did not care for and it’s my biggest complaint actually is that you don’t get to walk around and explore the map. The game sort of guides you though and does the walking for you. One big problem is that if you walk past ammo or any other relic that you could have picked up, you can’t just turn around and go back. The game keeps you walking towards your destination. One last complaint that goes along with the previous one is that lack of retreat ability. If you get into a situation where you are basically out of ammo, you can’t retreat back and get more. You are pretty much stuck with the infinite ammo hand gun. Overall I would say this game is ok for renting but I would NOT recommend buying this game. I hope that the game play on the Wii games like this gets better but for now I think I will stick with Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty on my 360.

My favorite Window Mobile Apps

2009-01-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

Here are some of my favorite 'TESTED' window mobile application. These applications have been tested on HTC Tilt running Windows Mobile 6 Professional:

Google Maps

Viigo - New, intuitive, interface delivering fully interactive services such as breaking news, real-time sports scores, financial information, audio pod casts, entertainment, and blogs.

S2U2 (Slide 2 Unlock 2- S2U2 is a simple lock/unlock application which has the iPhone style slide unlocking. It can be used as a screen saver while you don't use your device. And it's has a CallerID function.

OggSync - Sync Windows Mobile and Outlook with Google Calendar

S2V (Slide 2 View) -is a stylus-free picture viewing application. It can also be used to set up the wallpapers for S2U2 (v0.97 or later); assign a pic to a contact; set it as Today's wallpaper; or send it via MMS/email.

File Explorer Extension - Adds missing features to the standard Windows Mobile File Explorer.

And my favorite web sites to get applications for my Windows Mobile Phone:

Freeware Pocket PC
1800pocketpc

'Disabled by an administrator': Another random act of violence by a Facebook Administrator.

2009-01-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

So I finally signed up for a Facebook account after resisting for a long while. I created an account and almost immediately hooked up with a bunch of old friends from days gone by and was starting to get into the whole Facebook thing. I even found a very cool app for my Windows Mobile Phone called SkyBook so I could update my photo albums and respond to messages on the fly. Just when thing seemed to be going well my account got disabled by an administrator. I was first mad, then concerned about what had I done (in 3 days) that could have warranted this punishment. I sent email to their generic 'disabled@facebook.com' email address with no response. I know the service is free but I am fairly disgruntled about having my account disabled with no warning or explanation of what I had done. After waiting for a couple of days with no response back I started searching on Google to see if I could find anything out and I discovered that there were quite a few people that had suffered the same fate I had. Now I considered giving it another try and create a new account but I noticed that quite a few people had done that and their accounts were promptly disabled again. I will admit that Facebook 'was' cool and I 'enjoyed' using it but I can't believe that they can disable accounts without any information about what the major infraction was.