PaulSpoerry.com

Another cloud service is coming, this time on your phone. Dashwire is intended to mirror your phones content onto a web based interface. I’m sure the power users are thinking “I can already do that with other 3rd party apps. Yes, you can… but Dashwire is probably not intended for the ultimate power user and it does do a good job of providing a clean, easy to use web based interface for accessing for phones information. Some of the things they list that Dashwire can do today via their Web-based interface:

• Send and receive text messages (SMS)

•  Add and edit phone contacts

•  Easily organize your photos and videos

•  Listen to voicemails

•  Set Internet favorites, ringtones, speed dials, and wallpapers for your phone

•  Transfer contacts and settings to your new phone

•  Automatically upload photos and videos

•  Find friends and people you want to follow

•  Create a personalized web page to share your media

• Add comments and star ratings

• Single click photo upload to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo

The interface is smooth, grey, and very attractive looking. The fonts are large and everything is easy to read.

On your Dashwire dashboard are your photos and videos, contacts, bookmarks, and SMS and call history laid out in movable AJAX tiles. You can click to play on your ringtones (I found this a very easy way to manage ringtones. There are tiles for phone, and text messages and you can reply to them with your keyboard. Even with a Treo or Blackjack you can’t bang out an SMS as fast as you can on a traditional keyboard. You can e-mail photo links from Dashwire, too, without your friends having to sign up to the service to view them online. Contacts you add online materialize in your mobile address book. Essentially, Dashwire is allowing you a web interface for interacting with your phone, while at the same time making an online backup of some of the most important “data”. It’s not backing up your programs, registry settings or anything like that, but all your critical stuff like contact, messages, etc.

Now it’s time for the secret sauce: how your content gets there. Dashwire begins as a mobile app that most users will probably download over the air. It installs, and then syncs to your personal page on Dashwire.com, which you’ve configured by registering your screen name and number on sign-up. The synching takes FOREVER, and might take more if your mobile network is lagging. Photos and videos take the longest to upload, and even longer the more you’ve got. I only have the “stock photos” that came with my phone and I’m sure that’s the part taking the longest. I wonder about the value of that (personally) though for people unfamiliar with other backup solutions this might be a great alternative.

The video they put together gives a great overview of what Dashwire can do, so check it out and see if this is a solution you could use. The accounts are free (not sure yet how’ll they monetize this service yet) and it’s in open beta. Some improvements they could make are faster backups. Even once my phone was sync’d it still take a LONG time during the sync process… and I wonder… why? For the moment, it only supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and subscribers have to specify their carrier and device model when they register. Dashwire doesn’t manage files or programs, or perform certain small tasks like deleting photos from the phone or reading and initiating e-mail. Those would be welcome additions. Dashwire also has a setting to update your status on Facebook and Twitter… though I haven’t seen HOW this works or any instructions on their site for making this interaction occur. Still… for a beta it’s not bad and definetly worth checking out.

If you haven’t checked out SPB Mobile Shell 2.0 you really should. It provides a cool “Now” screen (first screenshot below), which is similar to the Windows Today Screen except that it’s a more refined “immediate” window into your current activities. One of my favorite new additions is the beefed up contacts. You have photo contacts, but when you click on one you get a very finger friendly list of ways to contact them (second screenshot below). Mobile Shell 2.0 also introduces gestures so that you can access the mobile shell panes from any application and get real time previews of them (third screenshot below).  That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there’s much more under the hood but I won’t go into detail on that here.

So that all sounds pretty sweet right. One thing is lacking, it’s not really all that customizable. You can change the color scheme (or make it match your existing scheme) but you can’t change the icons, or re-arrange a whole lot. I imagine a lot of that is by design… Mobile Shell is meant to be very easy to use an intiutive, they didn’t overload it with a boatload of customization abilities to keep it simple. But… power users are power users and they of course see the awesome potential and want to trick it out. Enter the amazing folks at XDA developers. They’ve figured out how the whole thing is put together and started hacking away.

What you get are program screens that look like these:

As well as tricked out now screens that look like this:

Wanna find out more… hit up XDA. I imagine many more threads will jump out but here’s the main one thread now. Here’s a direct thread on how to remove the top 12 pinned icons from your Launcher and center the 6 grid launcher. Personally I don’t mind the “quicklaunch”, I’ve pinned a bunch of often used apps up there and find that pretty useful. Want I want to know how to do is replace the bottom buttons (in the last image above) with the HTC style icons. I’ve seen images of people who have done it, but I haven’t figured it out… yet.

Power users need power utilities, and Windows’ default system programs barely get the job done. Over time third-party developers have stepped and build superior replacements to programs like Notepad, Paint, Windows Explorer and the Command Prompt. Get the simple jobs done smarter, faster and more efficiently with these free utitlites

read more | digg story

I love the concept of UAC. I’m sure it’ll make the OS more secure for people like my mom. For power users, you’ll soon want to just shut the damned thing off. I know it has good intentions but it just gets in the way sometimes. I was always under the impression that UAC was either on or off, and that if you turned it off you lost some of the security built into IE7. Turns out the folks over at TweakVista have written up an article on how to disable UAC, but only for the administrator accounts. That’s pretty slick, now it won’t get in my way, but it will prompt my wife/kid/mother/etc and help keep them safe.

Follow these steps to disable UAC only for administrators:

1. Click on the Start button and type in secpol.msc and hit Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies and then Security Options.
3. Scroll to the bottom and locate “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”.
4. Right click on this setting and select Properties.
5. Set the value to Elevate without prompting.
6. Reboot.

As soon as you do this, the security center will start barking at you that UAC is disabled. I guess they intend to annoy you one way or another. You can of course disable the security center alerts as well. Click on the alert in the system tray, then click Change the way Security Center alerts me and select ”I do not want notification messages from Security Center”.