N97 Freeware & Wallpaper Collections

[davecozens]

Right, I've been doing some things...

I've tweaked the look of the freeware site at www.davecozens.com/n97

I've brought the wallpaper site in line with the look of the freeware site - and now you can upload your own wallpaper at www.davecozens.com/n97/wallpaper

Feedback, as ever, appreciated...

If the wallpaper proves popular there'll probably be a widget...

D

[zxon]

When everyone says to be green, that's not what they mean

Just messing. Nice tweaks and liking the full integration of the wallpapers.

Did you give any further thought to making the wallpapers 640x640 instead of 640x360?

[Samson.Real5]

Yes I check the website all the freeware applications and wallpapers are so good and it so cool themes which are suitable for my phone and best applications are there which are working on my mobile.

Technology First

[davecozens]

You can upload 640 X 640 or 640 X 360

I find the resolution of the background irritating as hell... If you do a landscape for 640 X 360 the rotated version will be a completely different.

it's like in landscape orientation you'll get some ground and sky, but in portait you'll get all sky or all ground. crackers!

am I making sense?

i.e. at 640 X 640 you get one of the two rectangles...

[zxon]

Absolutely it makes sense, and thanks for the illustration

I'm going to look into exactly what you see when making a 640x640 background image, and maybe provide precise measurements for people so they can make great backgrounds for any N97 that's open or closed.

[davecozens]

If you use 640 X 640 you get a big + shape from the middle

So, in my example above you'd get

and

[zxon]

Okies I've been doing some checking on this and davecozens is right. Both portrait and landscape modes will show the middle of the image. Below are my findings. Feel free to click the images to see them full-size

This is the image that I used for my test, cropped to 640x640 (yes, it's a photo taken with my N97 at Chester Zoo):



This is what the image looks like on my phone, in both landscape and portrait:



From comparing the images, it's clear to see that only part of the image is shown on the homescreen. To illustrate this, I have shaded what we actually see in both phone orientations in white below:



If you want to make a really good wallpaper for your phone, I would strongly suggest that all (or most) of the main focus of the image falls in the white box in the middle. I've taken the liberty of making a transparent GIF guide image for anyone who wants to make effective wallpaper for their N97 (or any other S60 5th edition device, for that matter). It's attached to this post below.

I hope this helps everyone

[davecozens]

But seriously. WTF were they thinking. How irritating is this?

I don't wan't my wallpaper doing weird sh*t like this. I want the wallpaper to be stuck with wallpaper paste to the back of my screen with out stuff hanging in front of it like pictures and cermaic ducks... If I rotate my phone 90 degrees to the left, the wallpaper should go with it.

It's incredibly difficult to put together a wallpaper that looks great in BOTH orientations and follows this rule. Especially if it's non-abstract.

I want an option that turns off wallpaper rotation in the next firmware.

Are you listening Nokia? No? Didn't think so... *sigh*

[zxon]

Hmm, I was hoping that last message was going to praise the effort I made helping out (and the really nice photo to boot) but guess ya can't have everything

I can totally understand why Nokia have taken this approach to dealing with wallpaper images. If they didn't, then we might see any of the following happen:

• When we rotate the screen the image will remain fixed, which means that wallpaper made for portrait mode will be on it's side in landscape mode, and vice versa.
• Images made for one orientation will be stretched to fit the other upon rotating/opening/closing the phone, resulting in a stretched or squashed image that's completely out of proportion.

By doing it the way Nokia have done it, it ensures that the aspect ratio of the image is not lost and that it still has somewhat of a "wow" factor by rotating with the rest of the screen when you open the phone. If they didn't, I can bet ya anything that loads of people will be complaining about one of the above.

[davecozens]

*Blatant plug type thing*

I've just added a new section to my n97 freeware/wallpaper collection with (basically) a bunch of links to N97 stuff (screen rpotectors/cases/car chargers/etc) on amazon.co.uk.

I'm only linking stuff that rated well on the site and I'm going to add other sites (play, etc) later...

Now, obviously it's all affiliate links (i.e. amzon gives me thruppence if anybody buys anything) but hopefully it'll help support my bandwidth costs and time

There's an amazon search box too

Thanks for you tolerance

*sits and waits for teling off*