Announcing: Diamond SensorScroll

This Christmas I gave myself a new HTC Touch Diamond as a present. To be honest I made the present a month earlier, but who needs patience when it comes to hi tech gadgets?

I played around with it and found some missing features. The most obvious for me was, the phone has a great sensor control which is used only by several HTC applications and Opera (custom version made for HTC). I decided to fix this and that's how I met Windows Mobile 6.1.

I spent some time in research and writing simple test applications and found, that though it is "Mobile", it is "Windows" only around 50% (the other 50% came from the Microsoft's marketing department I guess). Don't get me wrong here. It doesn't mean I don't like it. It's just quite different from PC Windows. API is same - but not quite, internal architecture is totally different and this left useless almost half of my Win32 API knowledge. After a month of research and a week of codding I finally brought my idea to life.

Announcing: Diamond SensorScroll
This is my latest free application. There are several things that happen for the first time because of it.

• It is my first application running on Windows Mobile.
• It is my first application published first outside my site and then on it.
  
• It is my first application, about which people wrote comments and blog posts just hours after the initial release (on 1.1.2009).
  

All of this happened because I stepped into the great community of the http://forum.xda-developers.com/ site! The guys there got me unprepared! All I expected was several downloads and some bug reports. Unstead I got many thanks, Near a 1000 downloads in first 10 days (I released 3 bugfixing versions in that time and the application doesn't have a 1000 users just yet). Greatly described bug reports with aditional analysis what went wrong. More thanks. Cool feature ideas. Links to blog posts for "spreading the word". Idea to add donations link. And more! All this, made me feel really happy to be part of this community. THANK YOU GUYS!

Now you know why the primary site for Diamond SensorScroll is http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=466377 :)

Have fun!

P.S. The picture you see in this post is from another blog post. I liked it, asked the author, and got a permission to use it from now on. I hope this illustrates my point one more time :)