Web Design-Give Your Cellphone Night Vision Goggles

Pictures Taken 25 January 2009

One of the least great things about my Cingular 2125 cellphone is its crappy 1 megapixel camera. Not only is it fixed focused, and has low resolution, but also, it also has no flash. But since my trusty Vivatar finally gave up the ghost after a long valiant struggle with the many injuries incurred by its clumsy owner, the cell phone has been the camera of the day. And it hasn't been a tragedy. I have been very happy with the results, for my photo blogs. Remember the resolution for the web is 72 pixels per inch.

But what to do when it is dark. The Cingular begins to start taking very dark pictures at the first hint of twilight. It was almost completely dark when I took this picture. There was some ambient light from the street light and the lights at of the pool hall at behind me. I thought, well I will come back in the morning. Well I came back in the morning and the poster was gone.

This shot was especially important because it was an update of an earlier post. So I had to deal with the picture I had. GIMP to the rescue. Gimp is a free photo editing application. Follow the link to download it. It is nearly as good as Adobe photoshop. To give my cell phone supper night vision powers I opened the original picture into Gimp. I then selected the colors tab from menu bar above the picture. Then I selected the Levels functions. I then just moved the little triangles so that the "mountain" in the levels screen was bordered by the two end triangles, leaving the space with no levels outside the triangles. In five minutes I converted the first image into the second.

As you can see while the change was dramatic, the end product wasn't great. But it was enough to convey the message I needed for my entry.

Must have Office to Sync Schedualling Functions

Though I hate to admit it, one of the great things about having a Windows Moble is that is like having a little Windows computer in your phone.  Though it runs on a completely diferent operating system the interface is very familiar.  Every time I use a Windows Mobile product, I am reminded of all the good things about Windows, and believe me there are some.   If I ran Microsoft I would be out on the street courners handing these suckers out for free.  Given the disappointments of the Zune, Vista and the X box 360 one ould think that Microsoft would be be jumping all over its Windows Mobile platform.  But such has not been case.

I believe one of the bigest mistakes a company can make is to nickle and dime its customers.  I was a dire hard Newton fanatic.  Though it no longer works it still has place of honor in my wedding chest.  But I could never get over the fact that until the final modles the Newton did not come with free software to transfer files back and forth from the computer.  

While many speak to the high price and initial problems with hand writing recognition, I believe this one feature did deathly damage to the product line.  It left a large part of its customer base with a crippled piece of equipment.  So when I recieved my first Windows Moible product, a cingular 2125 I was happy to see that it came with not only a program to transfer files, Activesync,  but also a version of Microsoft Office Outlook, a product that I would have never considered buying.  I began to use outlook to syncronise my phone calender with the computer.

I was shocked to learn that now many if not all new phones come without a version of Outlook express and that the newest version of Activesync does not even support the version of Outlook that came with my phone a couple of months ago.  Now I use a different calender all together.  This seems to me a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish.  Microsoft faces almost no competition in profesional e-mail applications.   But it does increasing competition in the OS world.

Having the calender function dependent on Outlook has not made me anymore eager to drop Open Office, but my little Mobile Windows was giving me a warm fuzy feeling about Windows that probably was worth a lot more.

Instead of finding ever more frustrating ways to squeez a little money out of Windows Mobile users, I believe that Microsoft would be much better served by folding Zune's functions into Windows Mobile and using Windows Mobile as a gateway to the primere product.

Mobisoft to the Rescue

One of the bigest frustrations of having a Windows Mobile Smartphone is that it is a crippled inseveral ways.  It can't play flash videos.  It can play RealPlayer content.  And it has no native support for Adobe PDF documents.  All of these defects have been keenly felt by me.  But none so much as the lack of PDF support.  I have become addicted to Google Books and have dearly desired to take the books with me.    I tried various free PDF readers for Windows Mobile Smartphone.   But as the Google Books PDFs are composed of images rather than text, none of the readers worked.

I then downloaded the free book reading software ate Mobipocket.com.  You have download the software for your PC first.  Then you can install the software for your mobile phone from the desktop software.   The desktop software will also allow you to import PDFs and convert them into a format that the software on your phone can read.  You have to select the page and then you can zoom in with '5' key and out with '0' key.