Here are some tips and tricks I have found on the net and by myself:
Launching your application in the unlocked emulator
The folks at xda-developers.com have released the unlocked emulator of the 6414 build a few hours after it became available in the updated Beta developer tools. To get the unlocked emulator, see this forum thread.
To launch your own app in the unlocked emulator, all you have to do is start the unlocked emulator, and THEN start your app from Visual Studio / Blend. Couldn’t be easier!
Listening to the emulated radio
To access the radio, go to the Music / Videos (Zune) Hub. The emulator warns that you should connect a headphone as that acts as an antenna, but then plays the short audio loops anyway… It is a nice touch, that every “radio station” has different music playing
Shortcut keys
The emulator has a number of shortcut keys that are good to know about:
- The hardware keyboard can be toggled by pressing the Pause key, or opened / closed via the Page Up / Page Down key. The hardware keyboard closes the software one, so you can only use on at a time. When the hardware keyboard is open, a little icon is displayed on the top of the screen:
In some applications, this icon changes to indicate the current keyboard layout:
- F1 on the keyboard equals to pressing the back button on the phone.
- Pressing the F2 or the Windows key while the emulator has focus acts as if the phone’s Windows key was pressed. Continuously pressing it for a while brings up the voice command / search interface.
- F3 works as the third physical button on the phone, bring up the Bing search.
- F7 is wired to the physical camera button. By the way, is it just me, or do others also think that in portrait mode, the exposure button looks like an ugly skull looking down? If you take a picture, you can later find it in the camera roll. Unfortunately, the emulator is not taking picture from your webcam, you can only snap a small rectangle that moves around the screen… oh well…
- F9 and F10 raise and lower the volume. Pressing these brings up an interesting piece of UI, for controlling the currently playing music or radio, and switching the phone to vibrate.
I hope you found something useful in this list… let me know if you have more tricks! Especially if you can get some songs into the emulator’s music library…
Posted
Jul 19 2010, 11:42 PM
by
vbandi