Intelligent batcklight control

[Guest Root-dir]

Okay as I'm sure many of you know the backlight on the omnia has a few....issues

1) it's quite vampiric in nature when it comes to the battery

2) If you turn it off (to supplement #1) screen rotation via the accelerometer no longer works

3) if its off (to supplement #1) the screen becomes nearly impossible to read in braud daylight

4) the whole light senseing thing is great but even the lowest brightness with it on and ou run in to problem #1

So after thinking about diffrent solutions to this problem I think i have a good concept and would like to get everyone here to give me some input.

Proposed solution: you know how the cammera button has a "half-click" thats used to do the auto focus when you are in the cammera? well my idea kina opperates around the fact that thats used no where but when using the cammera. when you are inside or in low lighting conditions the backlights "dim" or "off" is plenty sufficent for you to read the screen this setting can be seen by going in to the pwer settings and deselecting the turn on backlight when button is pressed or screen is tapped. this conserves MASS amounts of battery power which is a nice thing to have.

so my Idea is the backlight need only be on while one is holding down the "half-press" on the cammera button this way by default the backlight wont come on and SUCK your battery if you are in a lighting condition that dosent need it .

in the event you do need it (bright lighting conditions or you want to rotate the screen in low light conditions) you can simply hold down the farily easy to press half-click cam button long enough to read what you want to on the screen or to rotate the screen.

now while this is all well and good I dont have any experince programing on a windows mobile device and my desktop programing is limited to c++ and shell scripts. I also dont know if we even have access to the half click funcionality on the cam button on a programming level or if its something samsung didnt think we would need and hard coded it in to the cammera software.

Im going to dig through the new samsung apis and see if i can find anything about the half click button but I need to know if anyone would be willing to help or would find something like this as useful as I think it would be.

If you made it through that wall of text with out huring your brain too much then good job id like to take this time to appologize for lack of puncuation and or spelling/grammer.

[Guest dwethiswar]

defo not a bad idea but limiting the app to only work with the half-press of the camera button sounds a bit too specific. In terms of programming, I'd just make two parts in the app: one that handles the brightness/rotating stuff, the second one that handles input controls where user can choose to map any button/event to the first part, and eventually a special case for the half-press. Don't know about the API, but I'd bet the camera button is actually two buttons both in hardware and software (also if you press is there's a distinct 'click' when pressing it full on)

Edited March 15, 2009 by dwethiswar

[Guest dwallersv]

Great idea, root-dir! My only feedback is this: Requiring that a button be held to sustain some function while having to do something else is always a very bad idea. While in theory it sounds neat, it never works out that way, being too awkward to make it easy to use.

The preferred way to do things like this is a simple toggle. I.e. hack up a way to be able to easily toggle the "backlight off" (really, backlight dim) mode with a hardware button. To get around the problem of unintended activation, make it a quick double-click or something.

IIRC the limited range of dimming on the Omnia display is artificial -- the hardware has the ability to realize the full range of brightness from truly off to full on, and it supported by WM. The limited range is an artifact of Samsung's display control cpl and its implementation (probably motivated by the lousy contrast of the display in bright lighting). So you might also look in to this, and allow for creating a "dim" setting, when activated through your extension, to values below the minimum Samsung's implementation allow.