Wednesday, February 17, 2010

HTC Sync wonders

Recently I've installed HTC Sync v2.0.18 (PC sync software for Android based phones) and got quite surprised to find out how it works. It runs a process called something like FsynSrvStarter.exe. However here is how it works. It starts the executable mentioned above every few seconds (like every 3-5 seconds). The executable checks something - probably for Android connected device and quits. The version info of HTC Sync manager files, show "Teleca AB" as a company. It's strange HTC, whose products I use and love, is providing such poorly designed software to its users. This is a classical example of how the things should NOT be done. So here is what I have to say to those Teleca AB guys: "Do you have any idea how expensive is for the OS is to run a new process? Did you heard about the wonderful world of inter-process communications (known also as IPC)? How about using some named mutexes and/or events for a change? Please have some time to do things right and don't get you poor users pay for your lack of knowledge!"

Update: I've checked it on my work computer. The time between FsynSrvStarter.exe starts there is more like 30 seconds. Still not the right way to do it!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

How to transfer contact between different flavors of smart-phones

I was having this problem lately when I needed to transfer my contacts between Windows Mobile and XANDROID for HTC Touch Diamond. After a quick search I've found a solution and it appears that this could help others too. It's called Google Sync and can be used not only for synchronizing, but for transferring contacts and other data between smart-phones too. The good thing is that it support many smart-phone OSes. At the time of writing these are: BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia S60, SyncML, Windows Mobile. The bad thing is, google now have my name, my contacts, my blog. Now I can only hope that "do no evil" policy is intact and will stay that way!