How-to: Customize your Comm Manager (CMSettings)

Tired of the bland look/feel of your Windows Mobile device’s Comm Manager? Check out this guide to easily customizing your Comm Manager with skins and styles — for FREE!

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CMSettings by edba and FInixNOver
(Comm Manager Settings)
Version 1.0 – 2008

The author’s disclaimer: This application may be redistributed by any means, however, it cannot be sold for profit, and providing that this notice and the authors name is included. This application is provided “as is” with no expressed or implied warranty. The author accepts no liability if it causes any damage to you or your Windows Mobile device whatsoever.

Description:

CMSettings was created to make the Comm Manager customization easier. It allows the user to change between available stiles (skins), and select the desired Comm functions to use.

Download

edba & FInixNOver CMSettings.cab

System requirements

- .Net Compact Framework 2.0 or higher
- Comm Manager

Installation:

When the application starts, it will search the Windows folder for available skins. With this we can prevent applying a skin that doesn’t exist. It also makes a backup of your present Comm manager settings just in case you want to go back.

Just select one of the available skins, change the functions to your likings and apply changes. There’s no need to terminate the Comm Manager process, as the application will do it for you.

Skins

Default Skin – This skin will always be available since it belongs inside the CommManagerRes.dll(this file is necessary for Comm Manager to work, so…) It supports from 4 up to 12 functions.

Touch Skin/Large Buttons Skin – This skin will be available, as long as the skin files are located in windows folder, and it has skin files for a minimum of 8 functions. It supports 8 to 10 functions. When the user selects this style (skin), a popup window will appear to let him/her choose between 8 and 10 buttons.

Note: It is up to the user to know which option to use, according to the files he/she has put into Windows folder) If the user accidentally selects the wrong number of buttons to use, just select the skin once again and the popup will appear again. If the skin files are the ones provided by HTC the user can quickly get the HTC settings by selecting the menu option “Default Settings”. If the option is not selected, when applying the skin, a popup will appear asking if the user wants to apply the default settings(if you have customized the skin for different settings, just press NO and the user’s settings will be applied).

Touch Dual Skin/ON/OFF Buttons Skin – This skin will be available, as long as the skin files are located in windows folder, and it has skin files for a minimum of 6 functions. It supports 6 functions only.

About the Comm functions

• To select a function, just tap once.
• To enable/disable a function, tap twice. If the function is already selected, the user just have to tap once and it will be enabled/disabled.
• When the function is enabled, the user can see a green icon on the left side of the function text and the text will be black.
• When the function is disabled, the user can see a gray icon with a red cross on the left side of the function text and the text will be gray.
• When there are not files for a function in the selected skin, no icon will appear on the left side of the funcion text, the text will be gray, and the user will not be able to enable/disable the function.

About the Menu

About - A popup will appear showing info about the program. To close it just tap the popup.
Language - Here the user can choose the application language. If the desired language cannot be found in the list, the application can still support it. The user needs only to edit the CMSettings.ini (for more info on how to do this see “How to edit the .ini file”).
Default settings – It can be used in all styles, but the best use of this function is when “Touch Skin/Large Buttons Skin” is selected, to apply HTC Settings on HTC devices (since when using the HTC skin, the functions must be in a specific order, so the background doesn’t get messed up)
ROM Default settings – On first run, the device backs up the existing Comm Manager settings. This option is used to get those settings back.
Apply settings – Use this option to apply the changes made to the Comm Manager settings.

How to edit the .ini file

The application is provided with a few .ini files containing the following languages:
- English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian,

The following languages will only fully work in ROMs that support them:
Vietnamese, Russian, Czech, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Norwegian

If the user’s language is not yet supported, it can easily be added by translating one of the existing languages. To do this, open CMSettings.ini with a text editor, copy all lines from one language, and translate all the strings. If the user’s language needs special text encoding, make sure to save into a separate file. Finally copy the new .ini to the same place as CMSettings.exe, and restart the application. Now the language will be available to be selected.

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