The MoStacks program on Windows and the MoStacks program on Symbian can talk to each other for easy transferring of stacks between PC and phone.
A warning beforehand: This particular features is still very experimental. Often the transfers do not work reliably,and sometimes the phone even simply hangs. Resort to normal file transfer between PC and phone if you run into problems.
The UIQ2 versions of the MoStacks programs were able to transfer stacks as soon as connected by using the USB Sync Station and the standard PC Connectivity software from the phone manufacturer. Unfortunately the author was not yet able to get this very simple and user-friendly way of tranferring stacks to work.
So far, with UIQ3, stack transfers work as soon as there is a direct TCP/IP connection possible between the Windows and the Symbian program, without any firewalling in-between that might block TCP/IP traffic.
There are 3 principal ways to establish such a connection:
- over WLAN
- over Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN)
- over the phone network, with a data call
Transfers over WLAN work reasonably well. The author was not yet able to test Bluetooth PAN. Transfers over the phone network most probably cost money, might be slow, and often not possible anyway because of firewalls.
For the transfers to work, you must tell the phone the address of your PC, its IP number. You do so by setting PC address/IP number on the Settings Dialog. There is no mechanism to make this setting dynamically adjust to changing IP addresses, and not automatic detection.
The MoStacks programs currently talk to each other over port 7777. If you use a firewall on Windows, you have to make sure that the MoStacks Windows program is allowed to connect to the net over port 7777 and act as a server on port 7777.
For transfers, the role of the Windows program is a purely reacting one, as a server that waits for requests from MoStacks on the phone.
If you try to transfer stacks while phone and PC are connected, but the MoStacks Windows program is not running, there will be an error, and transfers will not work.
The Windows program knows a special folder for stacks; only stacks in that folder are downloadable to the phone, and if you upload a stack from phone to PC, it always goes into this folder. Sub-folders within this folder are ignored. (This is a still rather simple and limited system that is waiting for enhancement in future releases.)
You can configure the location of this folder in the Options windows.
Default is a MoStacks sub-folder in the My Documents folder that the installer automatically creates.There are three functions on the phone for transferring stacks, in the menu Stack of the Start View:
Download new: Download a stack that is "new" i.e. present on the PC but not yet on the phone. You will get a list of all available stacks in a list box in a dialog.
Update from PC: Update a stack on the phone with a more recent version of the same stack on the PC, after you made changes to the stack on the PC that you want to copy over now to the phone as well. There will be a warning if there is a contradiction, i.e. if the file date of the stack on the phone is more recent than the file date of the stack on the PC, so there is the danger of overwriting changes on the phone.
Upload to PC: Update a stack on the PC with a more recent version of the same stack on the phone, after you made changes to the stack on the phone that you want to copy over to the PC as well. As with the previous command, there will be warning if there is a danger to overwrite changes (changes on the PC with this command).
Please note that there can be false alarms regarding those file-date based warnings if the clocks of the PC and of the phone are not correctly configured. Both clocks must have the correct time, and time zone plus optional daylight saving time offset information must be correct. (MoStacks internally works with UTC times, and if time zones are not correct, wrong times will result and with them possible false alarms.)