Although MyMobiler allows to use skins, there is no Skin editor. A skin lets you view the windows mobile device on your windows PC to look like the real device.

MyMobiler skins support up to three bitmaps:

• the normal device bitmap
• a ‘hover’ bitmap
• an inverted bitmap

The first bitmap is responsible for the device look at your windows pc. You can use/define a transparent color and will get a non-regular sharp of the remote device look.

The ‘hover’ bitmap enables you to highlight rectangular areas for example for buttons on your device. These areas will ‘hover’, when the mouse cursor is inside the rectangle. The nice pink color is used for the transparent area.

The inverted bitmap will invert the rectangular areas of buttons, when you virtually ‘click’ them.

All these bitmaps and areas have to be defined in one xml file. Then you place the bitmap and xml in the MyMobiler directory and change the skin entry in MyMobiler.ini.

...
# ****************************************************************
# Mobiler Skin (skin file path)
#
# SkinFile=Skin\Skin.xml
# SkinFile=DefaultSkin.xml (Default)
#
# ****************************************************************
SkinFile=cn50skin2.xml
#cn50_numSkin.xml
ShowSkin=1
ShowMenu=0
ShowToolbar=1
...

All the xml definitions and usage have been copied from the DefaultSkin.xml file:

<form position="0 0 240 320"
    backgroundimage="face.bmp"
    clipcolor="FF00FF"
    hoverimage="select.bmp"
    selectimage="select.bmp"> 

    <button id="101" text="Menu" command="Menu" position="185 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="102" text="Show Menubar" command="ShowMenu" position="200 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="103" text="Maximize" command="Maximize" position="215 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="104" text="Close" command="Close" position="230 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="105" text="Show Toolbar" command="LoadSkin:expand.xml" position="20 340 200 10"></button>

    <button  id="106" runat="desktop" action="run"
            command="mexplorer" text="Mobile Explorer"
            position="245 4 15 15" ></button>

    <control id="200" text="MobileView" position="5 20 240 320" zoom="100"> </control>
</form>

Unfortunately MyMobiler does not support multiple keyboard planes and so we are unable to code for example the alpha layer of the CN50 keyboard where pressing the green button switches from numeric to alpha chars. MyMobiler alos does not support mutlikeys, like pressing the 2 key on the CN50 in alpha mode (green plane) one, two or three times to get A, B or C.

OK, here is the xml for the CN50 numeric keyboard:

<form position="0 0 240 320"
    backgroundimage="cn50_.bmp"
    clipcolor="FF00FF"
    hoverimage="selectCN50.bmp"
    selectimage="selectCN50.bmp"> 

    <button id="101" text="Menu" command="Menu" position="285 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="102" text="Show Menubar" command="ShowMenu" position="300 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="103" text="Maximize" command="Maximize" position="315 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="104" text="Close" command="Close" position="330 4 15 15"></button>

    <button id="105" text="Show Toolbar" command="LoadSkin:expand.xml" position="20 340 200 10"></button>

    <button  id="106" runat="desktop" action="run"
            command="mexplorer" text="Mobile Explorer"
            position="245 4 15 15" ></button>

    <control id="200" text="MobileView" position="55 85 240 320" zoom="100"> </control>

    <button  id="201"
            runat="mobile"
            command="soft1"
            text="Soft1"
            position="95 470 32 32" ></button>

    <button  id="202"
            runat="mobile"
            command="soft2"
            text="Soft2"
            position="225 470 32 32" ></button>

    <button  id="203"
            runat="mobile"
            command="talk"
            text="Talk"
            position="65 470 21 32" ></button>

    <button  id="204"
            runat="mobile"
            command="end"
            text="Call End / Home"
            position="255 460 32  38" ></button>

    <button  id="205"
            runat="mobile"
            command="Key:1"
            text="1"
            position="80 510 60 32" ></button>

    <button  id="206"
            runat="mobile"
            command="Key:2"
            text="2"
            position="150 510 45 32" ></button>

    <button  id="207"
            runat="mobile"
            command="Key:3"
            text="3"
            position="208 510 45 32" ></button>

    <button  id="208"
            runat="mobile"
            command="Key:4"
            text="4"
            position="90 540 45 32" ></button>

</form>

Note
You will see that the xml only defines some of the keys of the hardware keyboard of the CN50. I also don’t include a hover bitmap nor a completely worked inverted bitmap

First, the lines

    backgroundimage="cn50_.bmp"
    clipcolor="FF00FF"
    hoverimage="selectCN50.bmp"
    selectimage="selectCN50.bmp">

define the bitmap files to use and the clip color: FF00FF.

Then the following lines define the desktop side button areas of the skin image:

    <button id="101" text="Menu" command="Menu" position="285 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="102" text="Show Menubar" command="ShowMenu" position="300 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="103" text="Maximize" command="Maximize" position="315 4 15 15"></button>
    <button id="104" text="Close" command="Close" position="330 4 15 15"></button>

    <button id="105" text="Show Toolbar" command="LoadSkin:expand.xml" position="20 340 200 10"></button>

    <button  id="106" runat="desktop" action="run"
            command="mexplorer" text="Mobile Explorer"
            position="245 4 15 15" ></button>

    <control id="200" text="MobileView" position="55 85 240 320" zoom="100"> </control>

With these button definitions you control MyMobiler and can access the MyMobiler menu or close MyMobiler.
These desktop side button areas are followed by the mobile side button definitions:

...
    <button  id="201"
            runat="mobile"
            command="soft1"
            text="Soft1"
            position="95 470 32 32" ></button>

    <button  id="202"
            runat="mobile"
            command="soft2"
            text="Soft2"
            position="225 470 32 32" ></button>

...

All buttons should have an unique ID. Then you need to define, where to execute the command (desktop or mobile). The text field defines the command itself. For example “Soft1″ fires the soft key 1 on the mobile, “Key:3″ fires the 3 key on the mobile. Last you define the area where to click on the skin image. The same area is used for hover and invert visible ‘action’.

For the expand menu option, you also need the expanded bitmaps and another xml: expand.xml.

Downloads (copy all the files into your MyMobiler dir or a sub dir and then edit the Skin line in MyMobiler.ini)

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Unfortunately the webservice does not offer WSDL and so you have to write your own wrapper class. I wrote a small class that does the HttpWebRequest and decodes the xml reponse for easy use in your application.

When you query the webservice you have to use the following form:

http://ws.geonames.org/timezone?lat=47.01&lng=10.2

The answer will then be:

         <geonames>
            <timezone>
                <countryCode>AT</countryCode>
                <countryName>Austria</countryName>
                <lat>47.01</lat>
                <lng>10.2</lng>
                <timezoneId>Europe/Vienna</timezoneId>
                <dstOffset>2.0</dstOffset>
                <gmtOffset>1.0</gmtOffset>
                <rawOffset>1.0</rawOffset>
                <time>2010-03-02 12:14</time>
            </timezone>
        </geonames>

The sample application will use this answer and shows the result:

The attached Visual Studio 2005 SmartDevice Windows Mobile 5 project has two classes: GeonamesTZ is a blocking class and geonamesTZ is a non-blocking class.

A blocking code is never good and so I implemented the class with an event. To use the class include a using statement for the geonames namespace and then initialize a new geonamesTZ object. Then add an event handler for the object’s event delegate. Finally add a event handler function that will get the timezone data.

using geonames;
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        geonamesTZ myGeoTZ;
        geonamesTZfields tzFields;

        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            myGeoTZ = new geonamesTZ();
            myGeoTZ.geonamesEventHandler += new geonamesEvent(myGeoTZ_geonamesEvent);
        }

        void myGeoTZ_geonamesEvent(object sender, geonamesEventArgs e)
        {
            //Cursor.Current = Cursors.Default;
            //MessageBox.Show(e.m_myEventArgumentdata.strCountryName);
            tzFields = e.m_myEventArgumentdata;
            updateUI(tzFields);
        }

To get the timezone information you have to call the class function

            myGeoTZ.startRequest(txtLat.Text, txtLng.Text); //the answer should come...

and after some time the function myGeoTZ_geonamesEvent is called with the received data. Using the event driven approach will give the possibility to write an app that reads GPS data and updates timezone information in the background. Maybe this is usefull for Windows Mobile phones that often ’fly’ between continents. The timezone can then be updated in background.

As updating the UI from a different thread may fail, the updateUI function is implemented like this:

        // see http://blog.opennetcf.com/ctacke/2008/12/03/ControlInvokeWithoutExplicitDelegates.aspx
        public void updateUI(geonames.geonamesTZfields myTZinfos)
        {
            if (this.InvokeRequired)
            {
                this.Invoke(new EventHandler(delegate(object o, EventArgs a)
                {
                    txtDSToffset.Text = myTZinfos.dstOffset.ToString();
                    txtGMToffset.Text = myTZinfos.gmtOffset.ToString();
                    txtTimzoneID.Text = myTZinfos.strTimezoneID;
                    txtTime.Text = myTZinfos.tzTime.ToString();
                    txtTZcountryCode.Text = myTZinfos.strCountryCode;
                    lblStatus.Text = myTZinfos.strLastError;
                }));
            }
            else
            {
                txtDSToffset.Text = myTZinfos.dstOffset.ToString();
                txtGMToffset.Text = myTZinfos.gmtOffset.ToString();
                txtTimzoneID.Text = myTZinfos.strTimezoneID;
                txtTime.Text = myTZinfos.tzTime.ToString();
                txtTZcountryCode.Text = myTZinfos.strCountryCode;
                lblStatus.Text = myTZinfos.strLastError;
            }
        }

That was much easier than doing invokes on every txt field separately.

The raw xml response is parsed by another class called xml_helper. This class makes it easy to extract single values from the raw xml response. Here is one example:

namespace xml_helper{
    public static class xml_helper
    {
        public static string getStrSetting(StringBuilder sb, String sField)
        {
            string sVal = sb.ToString();
            string sFieldString = "<" + sField + ">";
            int iIdx = sVal.IndexOf(sFieldString);
            string sResult = "";
            if (iIdx >= 0)
            {
                string fieldStr = sVal.Substring(iIdx);
                string ssidStr = fieldStr.Remove(0, sFieldString.Length);
                iIdx = ssidStr.IndexOf("</");
                sResult = ssidStr.Substring(0, iIdx);
            }
            return sResult;
        }

These simple functions can be easily used on a xml file with single element data. Just call, for example getStrSettings with the xml string and the setting you would like to get.

Download Visual Studio 2005 SmartDevice Windows Mobile 5 project: DOWNLOAD:TimeZone by GPS demo application - (Hits: 244, size: 52.09 KB)

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