So the time has come to renew my mobile phone contract and I looked around to see what kid of deals were available. I’ve had an Apple iPhone 3GS for the last 18 months and been quite happy with it but  I’ve had a growing resistance to the Apple philosophy and been leaning much more towards open source software. Comparing prices for the iPhone 4 finally convinced me to make the switch to Android and I am now the owner of an HTC Desire HD.

When I first bought my iPhone the iPhone was the only good option for a smart phone but now with the growth in the availability of Android handsets many people must be in the same position as me and deciding whether to stick with their iPhone 3GS (or upgrade to an iPhone 4) or switch to an Android phone. Hopefully my observations, experiences and ramblings about the transition here will help some of you.

Week 1 – First Impressions
So here is my initial reaction to switching to the HTC Desire. The desire has a bigger screen but at first I found it difficult to use compared to the iPhone screen. The Desire screen seemed both more sensitive yet less accurate than the iPhone. After several days use though I’m beginning to think that it was really just that I’d been used to the iPhone screen and adapted to that and was now adapting to the Desire screen equally well.

The benefit of an Android phone is that you can install different on screen keyboards too so if you want so different methods of autocomplete or swype keyboards you can just install them.

Getting familiar with the Android interface was not too difficult, it’s just different to the iPhone so you have to forget your old ways and pickup the android way. Being much more open than the iPhone though does result in having many more options and different places to access those options where the iphone is more consistent.

Once I’d become familiar with the Android interface I began to start installing the apps I need and get everything up and running.

So a client tells me their Access 97 database form is showing them the wrong data for the date range they enter. The form is opened from a command button on another form where the user enters a date and this date is used as the link criteria to filter the main form.

I pulled up the query the form is using and it works fine when I enter a date. I get the date entered to pop up in a message box to check that it looks OK and it does then when I use the command button the data returned is wrong for the date entered.

I check the dates in the table are the correct format and that the regional settings of the PC are correct (set to UK).

After a little Googling it appears that in Access 97 VBA assumes automatically that all dates are in US #mm/dd/yyyy# format – which explains why the query worked fine but the command button (which filtered the form using VBA) didn’t work as it was converting the UK date entered to a US date and so returning the wrong records.

Luckily the fix wasn’t too hard. Use the format function to return the correct date if handling dates in VBA:


'Code Courtesy of
'Joe Foster
'
Global Const JetDateTimeFmt = "\#mm\/dd\/yyyy hh\:nn\:ss\#;;;\N\u\l\l"
Global Const JetDateFmt = "\#mm\/dd\/yyyy\#;;;\N\u\l\l"
Global Const JetTimeFmt = "\#hh\:nn\:ss\#;;;\N\u\l\l"

and then

SQL = SQL & "When >= " & Format$(Now, JetDateTimeFmt)


Many thanks to www.mvps.org for that one!

I use Google Apps for my contacts, mail and calendars and sync them with my iPhone (by setting up an Exchange account on the iPhone) and as last time the only way to get my contacts back was to delete the Google apps account from the iPhone and set it up again.

One solution to this is AltMove which is a program that allows you to press the ALT key and then left click the problem window and move it up until you can see the missing buttons.

Auto detection of the character encoding was enabled but didn’t seem to be working – until I messed around with the settings and did this:

• Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor and make sure that mailnews.force_charset_override is set to false
• Now right click on your Inbox and choose Edit > Folder Properties and make sure that the checkbox “Apply default to all messages in the folder…” is NOT checked.

We’ve had similar problems in previous versions of Windows and knew that the answer was to clear the icon cache. Here’s how you do it in Windows 7:

• Close all Explorer windows and applications
• Press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open Windows Task Manager
• Click the Processes tab and locate Explorer.exe on the list of processes
• Right-Click on Explorer.exe and select End Process
• Click File and New Task (Run) and type CMD and click OK
• In the Command Prompt window type each of these lines – pressing Enter/Return after each line:cd %userprofile%\AppData\Localdel iconcache.dbexit
• Now back in Task Manager Click File and New Task (Run) and type explorer.exe and click OK – Your icons should now be back to their correct icon.

It seemed that to get a desktop icon to open you had to click once to select it then double-click to open it (in effect making a double-click a triple-click).
I then found if I played around with the visual performance settings i could fix it.

Here’s what I did to fix it in my case:

1. Right click My Computer and select Properties
2. Click Advanced System Settings on the left
3. Click the Advanced tab
4. Under Performance Click Settings
5. On the Visual Effects tab ucheck ‘Animate controls and elements inside windows’

The Alpha 2 ISO image is available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ and here’s a quick screencast showing the installing.

The process has been shortened in video editing but only took around 20 minutes from boot-up to final reboot.