I'll be adding random thoughts on a variety of subjects here.

E-mail me if you would like a new topic adding.



Free or not?
GDesk is free. Not just during beta but forever.

My ideal is to have GDesk running on every UIQ 3 phone - then I can release PluginYouCantLiveWithout™ and charge a fortune for it, then take over the world!!! (Mwahahaha)

Having said that, donations are much appreciated!

One final note on this subject is with respect to plug-ins - GDesk has functionality to allow me to require an activation key to enable full functionality.
This is another way I might eventually start making some cash from the project without compromising the overall freeware nature of GDesk.
The basic plug-ins will always remain free, however; it's important that GDesk provides core required functionality within its base set.


Open source
The intention from the start of the GDesk project was to expose the plug-in interface publicly.
It's actually a fairly simple system, although I can imagine needing to expand it a fair amount for some of the feature requests that have been coming up.

I have now released the information required to create your own plug-ins - see the Plug-ins page!
I'm hoping we'll start to see a lot of interesting new plug-ins soon.


Where's my feature?
Some plug-ins and features are clearly very important to making GDesk a proper replacement for the standard system software.
I'd like to give you a pack of weak excuses for why some of these features aren't in yet.

a) Toggle silent
As far as I know it isn't possible on UIQ3 to directly toggle the silent status. Presumably it's possible on a system level since the system software can do it but I don't believe it is exposed to application developers. (If someone knows different please let me know!)
What I'm aiming for is to be able to add an icon to bring up the Volume mini-dialog, since that has the silent check-box on it, as opposed to the Sounds and Alerts control panel, none of the pages of which show silent mode...
So far I haven't found a way to trigger this mini-dialog either. Sometimes I really hate programming for UIQ... with BThack.jar its possible to on/off silent via BT. Tested with w580 -> P1i. 'Hacked' P1 has no software instaled. So maybe its possible to connect to self phone, and switch silet mode. LukasLt

b) Key lock
As with silent mode, I've yet to find a way to enable key lock programmatically.
That's not to say it can't be done, so watch this space!
If anyone wants a 'heroic' credit then this would be one way to get one!

c) Direct dialing / speed dialing
It's easy to trigger the phone application. I'm still looking at ways to pass the initial key press through to the phone app though. I've tried making GDesk wait for the phone app to be active before sending the key press event to phone, and even waiting for a few seconds after it's active, all to no avail.
It seems that it should be possible since the system software does it, but it may be that they have tighter integration into the phone app than I can get as an application developer.