Johan Sanneblad

It’s finally done. After an uncountable number of late evening sessions GapiDraw 4.0 has now been released!

The complete list of new features is shown below. If you are interested in Windows Mobile development you should really go and check it out!

New Features in GapiDraw 4.0

DirectDraw support. GapiDraw will now use DirectDraw instead of GAPI or GETRAWFRAMEBUFFER to access the display on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. Switching to DirectDraw means that GapiDraw applications can take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics and run in windowed mode, at the cost of slightly lower performance on devices without hardware acceleration.

Hardware-accelerated graphics. GapiDraw will now detect and use DirectDraw hardware acceleration on Windows Mobile devices if available. Functions supporting hardware accelerated graphics are marked in the documentation.

Windowed mode support. You can now run GapiDraw applications at high performance in windowed mode using DirectDraw on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. In windowed mode you can take advantage of the SIP input panel to allow the user to enter text data.

Fullscreen toggle. You can now seamlessly switch between windowed mode and fullscreen mode on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later.

QuarterSize display. If you use the new display flag GDDISPLAY_QUARTERSIZE, GapiDraw will use a backbuffer that is half the width and half the height of the display, if either the width or the height of the display is greater than 320 pixels. This is a great option for developing and running mobile games on newer mobile devices with display resolutions of 800×480 pixels and more (in this particular example the backbuffer would be sized to 400×240 or 240×400 depending on display orientation).

GradientRect. GapiDraw 4.0 introduces an optimized gradient fill operation with support for opacity. GradientRect can draw top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left, and prerenders the entire gradient in two directions for very fast performance.

Performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 adds StrongARM and XScale precaching (pre-reading four cache lines simultaneously) to BltFast and AlphaBltFast for important performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 also has improved performance on stationary PCs in windowed mode and much faster GDI surface locking.

Documentation improvements. All documentation was reviewed and much of it was rewritten. A new and easy to follow “Getting Started with GapiDraw”tutorial was added.

New advanced tutorial: Breakout. Learn how to use GapiDraw to create a complete mobile game using the easy to follow tutorial “Breakout”. You will find Breakout in the samples folder.

Improved Visual Studio 2008 support. All samples now include ready to run projects for Visual Studio 2008 mobile and stationary environments.

Answerkeys Disabler solves the problem of accepting or rejecting calls before you got your phone out of your pants.

From xda-developers.com

If you are the proud owner of an HTC Touch Diamond or the HTC Touch Pro, you have most probably also experienced the annoyance of having the display switched on each time a phone call is received. It doesn’t matter if you lock the unit or not, the incoming phone call window will be shown anyway.

I have been using slide2unlock the past weeks and like it a lot. However if you want a more light solution then the application Answerkeys Disabler will prevent the display from switching on if the display is off when the phone call is received. Very handy.

You will find Answerkeys Disabler at xda-developers.com

The past weeks I have been very busy adding new features to my mobile gaming platform GapiDraw 4.0, which has obviously had a negative effect on my blogging the past week. I’ll do my best to get up to speed again, but right now GapiDraw 4.0 is my main priority. The 4.0 release is shaping up to be a very good looking release, so it’s hard to stop working on it and switch to “blogging mode”!

So what is happening with GapiDraw 4.0 then? Well, lots of things. We will announce it publicly quite soon, and if you are a Windows Mobile developer - watch this space for updates.

On September 15 Sony Ericsson officially launched their Xperia X1 mobile phone. Following the release, videos, photos and reviews of the Xperia X1 have surfaced all over the Internet. Here are three recent videos going through the details of the phone:

Sony Ericsson Launch Webcast

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 Hands On

Hands-on with Sony Ericsson’s latest Xperia X1 Build (Beta3)

Slashgear has a good summary of all the hands-on pictures and movies that were published today on the HTC Touch HD.