Playing with minimo

With mozilla minimo recently released it will be interesting for web developers and geeks alike to mess around with it. For those not familiar with minimo it is basically mozilla’s alternative to pocket internet explorer for PDAs, smartphones and other devices that use Windows CE. And yes, it does have tabs! Here is what we can read on the official website (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/):

The Minimo has been focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, small screen usablity, and porting to small consumer devices. We hope to make Minimo the browser of choice on small devices, or machines with limited system resources; taking advantage of Mozilla's support for a broad and comprehensive set of standards and the variety of content on the web, proven security, international support, and cross platform capability.

So, you are already bursting with desire to test drive the new browser but don’t have a PDA? No problem. Here is a short guide for you:

1) Install ActiveSync.

2) Start ActiveSync

3) Open up Visual Studio 2005.

4) Go to the Tools menu, and click “Device Emulator Manager”

5) Select “Pocket PC 2003 SE VGA Emulator” and connect it.

6) Set your info and various options (optional).

7) In Device Emulator Manager right click your emulator and select “Cradle” from the context menu.

8) An ActiveSync dialog will pop up to create a new partnership. Using the default settings (a standard partnership) will do just fine for you.

9) Open up the “Connection Settings” dialog in ActiveSync and make sure you have the following:

10) In the emulator window, go to the File menu and click “Configure”. Then you can create a “shared folder” somewhere on your desktop and map it to the memory card of the device. You can then place there the minimo .cab file you downloaded from the internet.

11) Start File explorer and navigate to the memory card of the device:

12) Double Click on the Minimo installer to run it. There will be a warning about the version of the OS at the end, but you can safely ignore that.

13) Start minimo! You should have a fully usable minimo at your disposal.

It is really cool to mention that if you ignore the sizing issues, Minimo actually opens the telerik.com page without any errors. The ajax functionality implemented with r.a.d.callback works without a glitch! Job well done, telerik/mozilla!