Friday, September 24, 2004 - Posts
Well, I have an installer ready for the 0.9 beta version of Finch PocketBlogger (see screenshots and walkthrough). I actually went a lot smoother than I had imagined, as I have virtually no experience in developing desktop (or palmtop) apps. I've been doing Web apps for 8 years now and I know my way around in VS.NET, but I had expected more difficulties on the way. It was definitely a nice experience to target the Pocket PC platform.
Feel free to download and install. It is free (although I would ask you to check out the About screen). Also feel free to send me feedback, but I will feel free to ignore your wishes. ;)
I will probably opensource this toy soon, but I'm not sure when and how.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Finch is built upon the .NET Compact Framework, so you need either Pocket PC 2003 or you must have the Compact Framework installed. The installer will not do this for you.
I have the basics working pretty well now, so I think this is the time to post some screenshots of a walkthrough. When I have figured out how to do a good installer for PPC, I will post the binaries as well. After that, I will try to get it set up on SourceForge and continue work there.
So when you fire up Finch on your Pocket PC, it will look like this:
In this screen you see the most recent blog posts at the time of last synchronization. You can choose to synch up (posting only your changes to the server), down (getting a fresh state of your blog down from the server) or All (this is effectively Synch Up + Synch Down in that order).
To change or add postings, you can use the context menu:
The editing dialog is fairly basic, offering only a text interface for the body and title. No WYSIWYG or advanced options:
For setting up your connection, you can enter your .Text Url and credentials in the Options dialog (support for other blogging APIs is on the wishlist):
Note that after adding or changing any of the postings, the UI indicates this with a little red tickmark. Deleted items are grayed out. This way, you can see at a glance which changes must still be sent to the server. You can still undelete items as long as you have not synchronized.
Known issues:
- There is a problem with times and timezones. Posting times come out wrong when the .Text server is in a different timezone from the PPC that runs Finch.
- No help available
My name is Teun Duynstee, I work for the Dutch MS Solution Provider Macaw (we focus strongly on Microsoft technology). I am an .NET enthousiast and will try to use this blog for
- Post tech info that I stumbled upon in my work
- Keep the world posted on my hobby projects
As for the hobby projects, I am currently working on a small tool to maintain this (or any .Text) blog from a Pocket PC. It already works, as you could see from my previous post, but I want to brush it up a bit, remove some rough edges and refactor the code a bit before I post it. It is called Finch PocketBlogger and will be free and open-source. I'll post a screenshot later today.
Oh yeah, I also do some writing every now and then. I used to write on several books for WROX press (sadly went bankrupt) and recently wrote a few articles for ASPToday.