Expert: Werner "Menneisyys" Ruotsalainen

I can’t say I’ve been lazy in the last few days. Thanks to the excellent feedback the XDA-Develeloper folks provided, I realized I need to check out XDA-Develeloper coder A_C’s latest, pretty nice and, if you’re a big fan of iPhone-alike interfaces, pretty much recommended, free (!) utilities.

Non-iPhone platforms (including both the operating system – see HTC’s latest Diamond* have been trying to copy the way iPhone works and is used. For example, Symbian also has a similar tool HERE.

*: As far as the, well, built-in storage- and GUI responsiveness-wise, to put it mildly, not really convincing HTC Touch Diamond (which is all the rage today in the Windows Mobile world) is concerned, before I publish a full story on it, read the comments, including mine, HERE. They’re really worth checking out to see what the tech geeks think of the Diamond’s inherent problems – as opposed to what many sites state in their HTC Diamond announcement reports. You’ll see why the “4GB of built-in memory is more than enough for everything you can think of and you certainly don’t need storage cards to extend it” approach of HTC is pretty much flawed. The Diamond should either come with 16GB flash memory at least (as is the case with later iPhone models and the Nokia N96) and/or with an additional microSD slot – even if under the battery.

Slide2Play

Let’s start with S2P (Slide2Play), a stylus-free MP3/WMA player application. It simply lets you browse and play your music files. It supports album art but, as of the current version, not much else - for example, not even playlists are supported. The interface is, as with the other apps of the same author, very easy to use with fingers. Of course, because of the lower sensitivity of traditional touchscreens versus the capacitive, glass screen of the iPhone, don’t except anything as easily controllable as on the iPhone, particularly not on devices with screens known for their being overly insensitive; most importantly, the HP iPAQ 210.

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Q: How do I create WM5 themes?

A: Basically, WM2003SE themes should work on WM5 devices, except for some auto-color issues. Please read this and this on the latter; now, it's still unknown how auto-coloring, physically, works. This is why there still aren't theme creators explicitly for WM5 - not even from Kamware, the creators of the best theme editors/creators.

That is, just get a WM2003SE (meaning support for landscape and, if you have a VGA device, for VGA) theme creator. Please read "Everything you wanted to know about Today backgrounds / themes" (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, BrightHand) to be able to choose. Furthermore, in addition to reading my tutorial/roundup, you may want to read Vicott's excellent Theme FAQ here.

Q: I have a PPC2k2 device. I want to use a picture as wallpaper, but it appears unclear, not as the default background. What can I do?

A: Do you mean it's far less contrasty (and more gray) than it should be? This will always happen if you try to set your Today background image via Settings/Today/Use this picture as the background.

There're several solutions to this problem. Of them, the free Microsoft Theme Generator is the best choice for a PPC2k2 device owner.

(Using other, in most cases, commercial theme generators is an overkill because you won't need their WM2003+ and/or VGA-related capabilities unless you also want to resize/crop your images and set parameters not supported by the Microsoft Theme Generator, which is still meant for PPC2k2 theme creation. Unfortunately, the best on-PPC tool to set the Today background, the in many WM2003+ Pocket PC's built-in Pictures application, which also lets you set the transparency level, is missing from your PPC2k2 PPC.)

Incidentally, I've written quite a lot on everything Today background-related here (Alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, BrightHand).