16 bit screen? - MDA II, XDA II, 2060 General

Hi guys!
I have an O2 XDA 2 and have been working with it for a while (no phone as my contract has not been transferred yet). I have been looking closely at the screen and do we all agree this is a 16 bit screen? The O2 default today graphic shows significant banding on my machine - is this the same with others? is there something I am missing? Perhaps someone has some tests I can perform.
Thanks in advance
Angus

I've had similar thoughts myself but I'm not convinced as the banding only takes place for me with red/orange colour tones.

I've also noticed that WindowsMedia video is much more banded on the PPC than on the PC in 16bit colour - is the PC doing additional filter processing? Pocket MVP with dithering seems to be a lot smoother.

Related

Best img editor for PPC?

I just made some pics with my S110 and they are not that bad when photoshoped a little. So I'm searching something for my device that can do
- resize
- brightness
- contrast
- gamma
- levels
- noise reduction
ATM I use Imageer, is there a better one? I'm missing the noise reduction in Imageer and the pics are pretty noisy so that would be welcome to edit them a little and bring em down to 640x480 before sending by email.
Private-Cowboy said:
I just made some pics with my S110 and they are not that bad when photoshoped a little. So I'm searching something for my device that can do
- resize
- brightness
- contrast
- gamma
- levels
- noise reduction
ATM I use Imageer, is there a better one? I'm missing the noise reduction in Imageer and the pics are pretty noisy so that would be welcome to edit them a little and bring em down to 640x480 before sending by email.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pocket Artist 3
Wow, first time I hear of that software. I'll check that out asap. Thanks again.
By the way, does this tool work on magicians? The office forum has posts indication it does not: http://www.conduits.com/community/forum_posts.asp?TID=406&PN=1
it should work on Magician,but anyway try the second option....it's a software called "Idruna Photogenics"...
RAGO :lol:
I know photogenics but its extremely old and has not been updated in a few years while the newest version from pocket artist is from this september. Not sure how good photogenics still is.
Private-Cowboy said:
Wow, first time I hear of that software. I'll check that out asap. Thanks again.
By the way, does this tool work on magicians? The office forum has posts indication it does not: http://www.conduits.com/community/forum_posts.asp?TID=406&PN=1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's about v3.1. I have v3.0 and it works perfectly so. Check out version 3. Its really Photoshop in a portable form.
I use Pocket Artist 3.1 on my JAM with no problems. I do not associate any file types with it though, that may be an issue.
Tried the new one (version 3.11) yet? That one just came out a few days ago.
By the way, I have Imageer installed atm and if Pocket Artist is good I gonne remove that one. BUT Imageer is the viewer for img files atm and I'd like Pocket Artist to stay out (read that it is a little slow) as a viewer. How do I switch the file types back to album or the included viewer?
Edit: Tried Pocket Artist 3.11 and boy am I impressed. This is THE most powerful img tool for ppc. I'm off to buy that at once. Thanks again for that tip!!! Its not that good as a viewer (the first start is kinda slow) but HTC Album fills in nicely here. This is really the "Photoshop" for PDA.
You can also modify the registry to enable the "Editor" utility for the built-in Album program. It will allow you to resize, crop, change gamma, brightness, hue and contrast without installing any additional programs. It does not support layers of course!
Registry Modification as follows:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/HTC/Album/Disable Editor: set it to 0
That is nice to know for sure. Thanks for that.
I was searching for an editor that has one important function/filter: reduce grain or reduce noise. And Pocket Artist is the only that offers that filter. Thing is if I take some pics with the cam at xl res and do some level correction, contrast enhancements and grain reduce and then finally resize them to 640x480 they look pretty good for emails. Without the grain/noise reduce they dont look too good at all so that filter is more important than anything else to me when I want to send pics away by email.
I dont need the most function out of Pocket Artist, I only need 4 or 5 after all but the noise reduction is very very important to me and I've not seen a PPC implementation of it besides Pocket Artist. And ancient img editor called Photogenics had that too but the latest version is from 2001 and that is bejond good and evil so Pocket Artist is basically the only choice. Besides the workflow is pretty similar to Photoshop, the filter options for level correction etc. work very much like Photoshop. So if you know how to get things done with Photoshop Pocket Artist is the best there is.

Is it just me or is real VGA more trouble than it's worth?

Like a lot of people here I had been waiting rather impatiently for the real VGA hack for my Jasjar. Now that it's here and I've been using it for a week or so, I'm definitely beginning to see why MS didn't make this an option from the beginning, and I'm also beginning to wonder how much it's really worth.
Real VGA has two big benefits for me... it allows me to shrink the size of the bars on the top and bottom of the screen so I get more usable screen space, and it allows Pocket IE to run without it's stupid pixel doubling 'feature'... that's a big one for me.
Unfortunately it's got a lot of disadvangages too... it makes the bars on the top and bottom of the screen so small that they're difficult to use normally, and all but impossible to use while driving. Like I said above, making them smaller would be an advantage, but it's simply way too small. A lot of applications don't work well in real VGA mode... including the phone dialer, the calculator and others. The font size can't be changed for a lot of things... the start bar, the caller ID info screen, and others. This makes a lot of the information displayed quite difficult to read... again, especially while in a car.
As I've been thinking about it more and more, I realized that the only thing that I really need is for PocketIE to work without pixel doubling... then I'd be quite happy in non-VGA mode. While I doubt that will ever happen hopefully we'll get some third party browsers that will work nicely in non-VGA mode. Until then I think I'm going to be using non-vga most of the time and I'll just switch to VGA mode when I need to do a lot of browsing.
Anyone have any other thoughts on this?
Brett
I think that makes sense. We need dynamically switching VGA really. For day to day use, the thumb is just too fat for VGA. It's barely ok to use for QVGA driving/walking etc.
But for browsing, VGA is great. But it's too much and too tiring all the time I think.
V
yea...we need a button like the screen rotate button that lets us change the res whenever we want
I think I would also agree. There are only two advantages to using the o2vga fix. 1) The only app that it improves is the browser, But as Brett stated, in the car it is too small. It works well for some sites very well and others it is too small. 2) the best advantage is that after I applied o2vga, ms voice command now shows the contact info when i say show "contact".
I also am beta testing the wm5 thunderhawk browser. It allows 640 x 480 and 800 x 600, and 640 x 320(?). The font that is used in thunderhawk is hard to read and the app is very slow. Due to the slow speed and font, I'm not sure the thunderhawk browser on wm5 universal is worth it. ALL in all, the original IE browser with zoom to small or medium seem to look the best.
Brett: Couldn't agree more. It was great to see what the device can do, and how the screen really is, tiny! But in truth, the eyestrain was no joke, and finger operation became impossible. I did a lot of toggling between the two, and ultimately decided that what I was is the standard resolution, but with some hacks for:
- Smaller scroll bars (VJ mentions this somewhere)
- Shrunk edge bits in XL
- Smaller edges for Terminal Services (altho central area surprisingly gives same res)
- and of course a hack for PIE.
Now, surely the latter is manageable? It's simply how IE is rendering. Perhaps MS will fix this soon, or maybe someone can intercept the rendering engine. I even don't care if my images lose every second pixel in order to come to the right size at half the res.
Real time Resolution Switching
See the attached link to a bit of software, which once released for WM5 may solve the VGA issue. It allows switching between resolutions on the fly.
I tried it on my Blue Angel, and it worked great, albeit a little unstable.
Note the site says they've been working on WM5 compatibility since Feb, so this may be wishful thinking.
http://www.nyditot.com/Products.asp
It's certainly not ideal, but besides web browsing I would add that word processing is nicer in VGA. Fortunately I don't have to do that much, but when I did need to for a meeting, I appreciated the VGA. With the keyboard and VGA, the term Pocket PC is more than just wishful thinking.
It's certainly not ideal, but besides web browsing I would add that word processing is nicer in VGA. Fortunately I don't have to do that much, but when I did need to for a meeting, I appreciated the VGA. With the keyboard and VGA, the term Pocket PC is more than just wishful thinking.
I agree it is to much hassle to work smoothly in everyday conditions, personally I think its down to programmers to make font options more accessable, take the new version of pocket breeze, in qvga or vga it stays the same size on screen, and gives the user total control over all font sizes.
This is the sort of programming we need to utilise such a great display!!!
lol
kinda bull---- lol
i remember when whe had 640 resolution on the pc.. everyone hated it when we started to use 800 res.. and lets not speak about 1024 haha..
i see loads of people using 1600 res nowedays.. higher res means better image quality!!
It also means better games better everything. So 640 res on the exec is SUPER, we only need adjust (like the pc) font size and get larger better resolution icons for those people who like to nagg (just like on real pc's)
VGA resolution is the future, and i am sure we get 800 res soon also and maybe even higher.. better looking programs etc etc..
and if your fingers are to thick for dialpad then you must have problems with any normal gsm LMAO
Just get a skin where the ok button close button are larger and nicer..
but that is just my penny worth :twisted:

[new release] One more taskbar battery meter

Hello.
I recently decided that the i-mate tray battery meter was not good enough for my needs and wanted to find a better one. After a few hours of looking and not finding one that was perfect for me I wondered: how hard is it to write one?
Well, apparently its very easy.
I decided to share the result with the community. There are much better ones out there, but perhaps someone will find this one suitable as well.
Whats so special about it?
Its tiny! Only 8.5k. Downside of this - it doesn't have any options, nor do I intend to add any in the future to keep current size. Also it receives notifications on battery as they come in, so its very accurate without having to constantly check the battery and generate unnecessary CPU load.
It takes its behavior from the device driver which is why it will act differently on different devices when battery is charging. (Some devices report battery full, others report accurate percentage, yet others "slide" it in a loop).
View attachment priview.bmp​
Also it starts just after MS logo (as you can see from the screen shot I have that space occupied) and doesn't fill the whole screen (14 pixels are left so the units could be evenly sized).
Well here it is, enjoy View attachment LvmTopBat.cab
For those who wish to learn how this program works, or to create another using it as a base, here is the entire project:
View attachment LVMTopBat.zip
The project compiles under eVC 4 with Windows Mobile 2003 SDK.
This program is now released under GNU/GPL v3.0
(See License.txt for more info)
Hope you will find it useful.
Levenum,
Great little app. I wonder how it differs from the Sbp meter used in PocketPlus.
I like it!
Yeah, don't add any options to it, I like the idea of an 8.5k program. That was my problem with Batti, it just grew and grew and I don't care about that info.
thanks!
look nice, i will try it
Does it change colour? If not could you make a gradiated texture?
1-10% Red
11-30% Yellow
31-100% Green
levenum and others,
FYI, I decided 8.5 kb was just too big :lol: (I'm toally kidding) so just to let you guys know, you can UPX the file down to 6.5kb with no issues. :wink:
JNGold said:
I wonder how it differs from the SPB meter used in PocketPlus.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Never tried SPB PocketPlus so not sure. Maybe just the fact that it's not full screen.
Tyr said:
Does it change colour?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually, it does but only according to what the device reports. I found that on my Jamin for example, it reports 'low' (yellow) at 10% and 'critical' (red) at 5%.
It goes blue when charging, and I would really like to know if anyone got purple. According to MSDN documentation, there can be an 'undetermined' state reported by the system, but I doubt it can be encountered while device actually functions.
malatesta:Nice 8)
When I resume TyTN from the power saving mode, the indicator becomes purple for a second. So I can confirm that it works
It is better than SPB Pocket indicator because SPB is always grey, does not indicate charging, and its segments are of fixed length in both portrait and landscape and therefore have no a real relationship to the charge level.
It is better than IndiLite because it loads from the Startup folder (IndiLite from registry) and does not affect SafeMode of SPB.
Also it does only battery indication and this is good as well - there are too many apps and plug-ins that duplicate each other but not fully. For instance, before I used IndiLite only for the battery indicator, and SPB Pocket for task management.
is there a way to deactivate the spb pocket plus taskbar battery indicator (without removing spb pp), and have it replaced with this one?
Lurker0: Thanks for the test and the compliments.
Also it does only battery indication and this is good as well - there are too many apps and plug-ins that duplicate each other but not fully.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is exactly why I wrote it - small and to the point. No sharing small (yet precious) today space with memory indicators or other stuff.
Now someone needs to make a fully WM5 compatible Today screen plugin that just says this:
Battery: XX%
No fancy graphics, no graphs, no storage card memory monitors. Just something (maybe) with a configurable font (like TodayAgenda).
I know there are a couple out there but some have issues with refresh on WM5 and most others are just giant graphs that tell me nothing :lol:
try this
http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=55782&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Marx2 said:
try this
http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=55782&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow, thanks Marx2!
I used this app awhile back and completely forgot about it :lol:
malatesta said:
Now someone needs to make a fully WM5 compatible Today screen plugin that just says this:
Battery: XX%
No fancy graphics, no graphs, no storage card memory monitors. Just something (maybe) with a configurable font (like TodayAgenda).
I know there are a couple out there but some have issues with refresh on WM5 and most others are just giant graphs that tell me nothing :lol:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Someone extracted the O2 battery monitor from their software package version 3. It has a very simple bar for the main and backup batteries and a percentage.
levenum, I have one suggestion
Currently the indicator is divided into 20 segments. As I understand, there are devices that are able to provide battery information with 5% granularity (mine is 10%), and that's why you made it this way. But IMHO it is much easier to count 5 (from the middle) than 10.
So I'd suggest you to draw only 10 segments, and color a half of the segment, if required to display the odd 5%.
Actually, 5% granularity just seemed like a good compromise between accuracy an visibility. Like I said in the above post I made this for my self.
From every device I've seen and MSDN documentation it appears that all WM devices report battery status with 1% granularity so that should not be an issue.
As for your suggestion I currently have to arguments against it:
1) Having different graphics and handling for two halves of the segment (even though there will be half the segments) will mean a slight increase in processing power and size of file - something I am trying to avoid.
2) I don't think that half painted segment will look good.
I am considering releasing a full screen version soon though, so if I hear from more people in support of your suggestion I may implement it there.
levenum said:
I am considering releasing a full screen version soon though, so if I hear from more people in support of your suggestion I may implement it there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Personally, I like 5% (my treo does 1%) so this is just fine.
What do you mean by "full screen version"? You mean edge to edge, I assume?
first thanks for a great little App.
Personally i think that functionality wise it's fine as it is but i would ask for 2 improvements if possible,
1. Full screen , and as you have already mentioned this you can count it as a vote for it .
2. Would it be possible to change the colours ?
For me the green & blue would be better switched around (green charging & blue normal)
As i'm not sure how much this would add to the code and i agree that smaller is better , so is it possible for a couple of releases in the zip of different colour schemes ?
Thanks
Ok, first - yes, by full screen I meant edge to edge.
Changing the color scheme wouldn't add to the code, and is really a miner change. So yes I will release a zip with several versions, but there is something I have to do on the LVMTime project first.
I am also thinking of the following: without adding to much to the app it is possible to make it read some settings from the registry, like color change threshold, color scheme and whether it is full screen or not.
I just wonder if it will be to much to tell people to use a reg editor to change settings. (I am really not feeling up to implementing an XML parser)
well i for one have no problems with reg editing at all

Sceen Picture and Color Issues - Software or Harware?

I have a TMobile MDA (WIZA200) that is having some issues displaying pictures and such correctly.
The bars at the top and bottom of the "Today" screen, backgrounds, pictures from ROM, web pages, other graphic based software (iLaunch demo) all seem to have a grainy appearance. One similar to that of a older monitor unalbe to display colors at a higher quality rate. Think of Win95 and gif/jpeg viewers ... yeah ... it's that bad.
It's a brand new (to me) phone and was never damaged in any way (that I know - no dings or dents or loose parts) with a current ROM from TMobile. Is there any help anyone can provide? Any registry tweaks? Any software I should try?

remote desktop for 16 (NOT 16 bit!) colors

Our ICT guy at work managed to make the remote desktop mobile application work so that I can logon to the server at our work! This way I can easily make advantage of the software programs at our company while I m on the road. However, with the remote desktop mobile utility that came with my WM6 version (http://vidmes.com/Uni/ROMs/Laurentius26_UNI_RV1.rar) I cannot set the colors to 16. Only on 256 colors or 16-bit. If I could get 16 colors it will run much faster now with 256 colors. Can I achieve this (maybe with some other Remote Desktop utility?).
no ideas anyone?
really no clues guys?
Less than 256 colours doesn't make sense. Take a screenshot of a computer's screen and reduce it to 16 colours. You'll see masses of grey or red and probably won't recognize the screen correctly. But you may try to reduce the screen resolution of the PC whitch ends up in less trafiic because of smaller images whitch must be transferred.
Anticro said:
Less than 256 colours doesn't make sense. Take a screenshot of a computer's screen and reduce it to 16 colours. You'll see masses of grey or red and probably won't recognize the screen correctly. But you may try to reduce the screen resolution of the PC whitch ends up in less trafiic because of smaller images whitch must be transferred.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
for some works even 2 color is fine.
but which application can be used for remote desktop?
I've seen VNC for PocketPC recently (needs VNC server on the PC). Even the terminal client of WM2003 should work.

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