Kuneri bloggy

I recently felt the need of changing my VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta, because it kept on locking my Mac. I found VirtualBox, which is recently acquired by Sun, offered for free and has a recent release 1.6. I read some nice reviews, and although it lacks some features, looks like it’s quite fast and reliable (will review it when I get to use it more).

First thing I needed to do with VirtualBox, after setting up a Windows was to share files between my Mac (Leopard) and Windows (XP). VirtualBox does not offer drag and drop for now, but hopefully will do soon. To share files between 2 computers:

1. Install Guest Additions

Go to “Devices->Install Guest Additions”. After selecting this, open “My Computer”, and you will see there is Guest Additions installer mounted. Just double click and install. After installing, do not forget to reboot (that’s important).

2. Create a shared folder

Go to “Devices->Shared Folders”. Press “Add” (+ sign on right side). Browse for your shared folder on your mac. Pick up a good name and note it down (we will use the name later on). I suppose you selected a folder to share and named it “shared”.

3. Create a batch file

On Windows XP, shared folders are browsable. Easiest way to mount shared folders is to create a batch file, instead of writing a command each time you login. To do that, right click on Desktop, select “New->Text file”. Rename your text file to “Mount.bat” (or something else you wish). After renaming, right click on it and select “Edit” and paste the code below (with necessary modification, depending on your shared folder name. I assume it’s “shared” in our case)

net use x: \\vboxsvr\shared

Beware of the space in between “x:” and “\\” otherwise you will get;

System error 67 has occured

Which in my opinion a common mistake. Save the file and you are done. Just double click on “Mount.bat” on your desktop and you will see X: drive will appear with your shared folder on My Computer.

Enjoy :)

If you like Inkscape (an open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator) and have a Mac with Leopard; you will figure that it after installation it will not work. It will say that font caching might take time, but never start. It’s because of a simple bug, with a simple solution. Just open a terminal (Applications/Utilities) and type this, followed by an enter;

mkdir ~/.fontconfig

After that it should start normally.

And a note: Latest snapshot doesn’t seem to work. Just grab the latest stable package.

I just found a simple diagram I prepared for a common question: Can I develop my own plugins for KuneriLite?

Answer is “No” at the moment, but there is a simple way to use KuneriLite System plugin and communicate your application with your Flash Lite movie using KuneriLite. Check the diagram below.

Nokia published some tips and tricks for Flash Lite content and Actionscript optimizations.

This article gives some recommendations regarding performance improvements when using Flash Lite. Optimization efforts are needed in order to create a high-quality movie or application. The article covers both content optimization and ActionScript optimization.

One thing you might want to have in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress would be a local SIM card. Roaming is crazy expensive, so you should get one. If you do not know Spanish (like me), it’s a little blind dive, but following recommendations and a lot of asking + walking, I got a Yoigo with an internet access. Surprisingly, no one I asked knew about it, but it’s easy and it works. Here are some time saving instructions for you;

- Find a “The phone house” store. There is one in La Rambla. If you ask Tourist Information point, they will tell you
- Ask for Yoigo. Takes 5 minutes to register and get it working. You will need a passport, that’s all. It costs EUR 10 with EUR 5 credits included.
- You will want to have internet access. Internet access is not activated by default. If you know Spanish, call 622 and help yourself. If not, ask the gentleman or lady to activate it for you.
- Your internet connection should be activated in a day (mine did). I have no idea how much it costs, but can’t get too wrong, it’s already prepaid :)

Ugur.-

Mark Doherty from Adobe posts zip of nice set of articles for tuning better performance for Flash Lite and other Adobe’s project recommendations,guidelines, standards..

..mostly written by Adobe staff, you will discover strange Flash Lite oddities, bug work-arounds and tips for better coding for mobile devices.

..Also in the zip file are some particularly good articles that we use and are pulled from the Internet, thanks to those authors who are named in their respective documents.

Download documents from here.

Here is a great article from Yahoo User Interface blog: Challenges of Interface Design for Mobile Devices. Many good points mentioned and applies to most UI design cases.

The single most important concept to master when designing mobile device interfaces is “context”. The context in which an application is used and the context of how information is input are both key issues; each must be understood before a well crafted design may be implemented. When these two notions of context are explored, it becomes clear that designing for a mobile device can lead to a solution that is worlds different than its desktop equivalent.

Flash Lite 1.1 doesn’t support inline text input. For Nokia S60 devices, users have to navigate on to the input field and press Select button when focused. This activates native text input dialog, which is by default in “No Restriction” mode (you can enter any character you wish). However, that’s not very usable for some cases, and decreases user experience. For instance if you expect a numeric input from the user, it’s not reasonable to start the input dialog in generic mode. Instead, Adobe provides us a method via fscommand2 :

fscommand2(”SetInputTextType”, “Input1″, “Numeric”);

where, Input1 is the variable (”Var:”) name of the Input Field. This will start the dialog in numeric mode, so that users can start typing numbers right away.

However, this command won’t work anywhere else but root of the main movie. Therefore, if your input field is in a movie clip, just name your input field variable as “/:Input1″ and insert the variable and the fscommand2 code into a frame on root. It should look like this;

Input1;
fscommand2(”SetInputTextType”, “Input1″, “Numeric”);

Note: This is concerns only for Flash Lite 1.1 and Nokia S60 devices. Check out Jesse’s post to learn how the situation is with Flash Lite 2.x.

 3-Lib is now updated with latest devices and new HDSPA column. List is really useful for comparisons.

Most of the Nokia devices will go to Silent profile and back to General profile pressing and holding the “#” key.