Friday, May 30, 2008

Capture a movie scene.

A very popular type of mobile phone wallpaper is a movie snapshot. You can capture scenes in a movie by playing the movie (or the trailer) on your PC and then capturing the screen. On a Windows PC, use the Print Screen key to capture the entire screen into the clipboard. Then, in an image editor program (GIMP is recommended, but Paint works too), you can paste the captured screen, crop the movie scene, resize it, and then save it to a supported format. On a Mac, you can use the Shift-Command-4 key (the Command key is the one with the Apple logo on it) to capture a rectangular area of the screen into a PDF file (or PNG file in Mac OS X 10.4) and then use an image editor program to convert it to a size and format suitable for mobile phones.


Some movie players disable the system screen capture key. VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) is a free DVD and VCD player that supports screen capture.



How to Create Free Wallpaper?


Many commercial web sites, including most wireless operators' portal sites, sell downloadable mobile phone wallpaper for $1 to $3 apiece. But truth be told, it is very easy to create professional-looking wallpaper yourself, for free. The basic idea is to first select an image you like, resize or crop it to fit the phone screen, and then convert it to a supported image format before transferring it to the phone.

If you own a digital camera, you probably have many everyday or vacation pictures you can use as phone wallpaper. And if you've got a camera phone, you probably have plenty of wallpaper candidates sitting right in your Gallery. But if you are not the photographer type, plenty of free images are available on the Internet. A good place to start is Google's image search, at http://images.google.com/. I discuss more tips on capturing fancy images later in this section.

As I mentioned before, when you set an arbitrary image as wallpaper, the phone automatically resizes or crops it. But it is much better if you process the image yourself, since this saves memory space and bandwidth. It also eliminates the uncertainty associated with the results of the phone's image processing.

To turn an arbitrary image into a piece of wallpaper, you need an image editor program. I recommend GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), which runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X computers. You can also use the Paint program that comes with every Windows PCbut the resizing quality of Paint is poor. You should resize or crop the image to 172 x 143 pixels for Nokia Series 60 phones and to 128 x 128 for Nokia Series 40 phones. Nokia devices support .bmp, .jpg, .gif, and .png image formats. If your image is in a different format, you should save it to one of the supported formats.

Since the wallpaper overlaps with the information displayed on the phone screen, I recommend that you use images that are light in color as wallpapers. If you have a piece of wallpaper with large areas of dark colors, you probably want to reduce the contrast and increase the brightness to make it look "washed out."

Figuring out and remembering the exact wallpaper image size for your specific phone is kind of a hassle. But with the Nokia PC Suite, you do not have to do that! The Image Converter program in the Nokia PC Suite helps you convert any image to a size and format suitable for the wallpaper on your phone

How to Set an Image as Wallpaper?


Wallpaper is the background image displayed on the idle screen. On most Series 60 devices, the wallpaper occupies only the central part of the screen. On most Series 40 devices, the wallpaper fills the entire screen.

You can set any image in your phone's Gallery as wallpaper. On most new Nokia phones, you can simply open the image in the Gallery and select the "Set as wallpaper" item from the Options menu. If you have an older Series 60 phone (e.g., a Nokia 3650), you should go to Settings and customize the wallpaper for the standby mode. On a Series 40 device, you can also use the Settings Display Settings Wallpaper menu item to set your wallpaper. The phone automatically resizes or crops the image as needed to fit the wallpaper area on the screen.

When you set new wallpaper, the old wallpaper is discarded without warning. If you want to revert to the old wallpaper, you need to keep a copy of it in the Gallery. I recommend that you create a "wallpaper" folder in your Gallery so that you can switch back and forth between wallpapers whenever you want.

The Extended Profiles Pro program from Psiloc supports associating wallpapers with profiles on Series 60 devices. This way, when you change the profile, you change not only how the phone sounds but also how it looks. When you use Extended Profiles Pro together with the miniGPS program, you can switch wallpapers based on your current location.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Using Ring Back Tones


I have said enough about ring tones, which you hear when people call you. The latest twist in the ring tone fad is to use ring back tones, which are also known as caller tones. They are the tones your callers hear when your phone rings, instead of the "ring, ring" they usually hear. This is a great way to entertain your friends and show your taste to your callers. To use this service, your wireless operator must support it. You can purchase ring back tones from your operator's portal site. However, if you change your operator later, all your ring back tones will be lost.

How to convert MP3s to ring tones.?


Compared with MIDI music, MP3 songs make much more impressive ring tones. MP3 files can incorporate human voices and other sound effects. Most important of all, you probably already have your favorite music collection in MP3 format.

Unfortunately, most Nokia phones cannot use MP3 files directly as ring tones. The hack here is to first convert MP3 music to Audio/Modem Riser (AMR) or WAV audio files, which Nokia devices do support. The AMR and WAV files can hold the same type of sound as MP3 files, but the former are less compressed.

You have to be careful with the size of the AMR and WAV files. A full-length song in .wav format can be more than 50 MB. That is much larger than the memory space of most Nokia phones. I recommend you convert only a 5 to 10 second clip of your favorite MP3 song into an AMR/WAV ring tone.

The Nokia Multimedia Converter is a standalone application outside of the Nokia PC Suite. It converts a variety of PC audio/video formats to mobile phone formats. Also, it supports MP3-to-AMR conversion. You can download the Nokia Multimedia Converter program for free from Forum Nokia (http://www.forum.nokia.com/).

Also, many MP3-to-WAV file converter programs are available on the Internet as shareware or freeware. For instance, the very popular and free MP3 player, Winamp (http://www.winamp.com/), can export MP3s to .wav files.

Use MIDI songs as phone ringtone


MIDI is the acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is by far the most popular ring tone format. A MIDI file contains the musical notes of a song instead of the actual audio recording. Therefore, MIDI files can be very small, which makes them ideal for mobile phone ring tones.

MIDI songs are music only. MIDI cannot reproduce the human voice or other sounds that cannot be represented by musical notes.

The musical notes in a MIDI file are divided into several parallel channels. When a MIDI player plays the file, it simulates a different musical instrument for each channel and plays all the channels simultaneously. That produces the effect of a whole band playing the song together. Obviously, the more channels you have in a MIDI file, the better it sounds.

Many free MIDI files for popular songs are available on the Internet. However, most MIDI files you download cannot be used as ring tones because most free MIDI files have more than 256 channels. A Nokia mobile phone can play only 424 notes at a time due to hardware limitations. The Nokia Sound Converter program in the Nokia PC Suite allows you to reduce the number of channels on any MIDI file and create Scalable Polyphony MIDI (SP-MIDI) files that are suitable for a selected Nokia device. Using this tool, you can define channel priorities for the conversion, which specifies which channels to play and which channels to omit.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Set a ring tone for a profile

On most Nokia devices, you can specify a different ring tone for each profile. On a Series 60 device, you can just open the Profiles application and select the Options>Personalize menu. When you open the "Ringing tone" item, you are presented with a list of all audio files stored in the device (i.e., in the Gallery). You can choose any of these audio files as the default ring tone for this profile.

Your phone should have come with quite a few ring tones pre-installed. To hear a ring tone, scroll to it in the list and pause for a few seconds.

On a Series 40 device, you can select a profile from the Settings Profiles menu and then select Options>Personalize to change ring tones. If you want to select a ring tone from an audio file in the phone's default Gallery folder, choose the Open>Gallery item in the list of available ring tones.
On Series 40 devices, you can use the Settings>Tone settings menu to customize ring tones and alert settings for a currently active profile. On some devices, you can also navigate directly to an audio file in the Gallery and then set it as the ring tone for the current profile via the Options menu.

Change Phone Profiles Based on Location

Another Psiloc program for Series 60 devices, called miniGPS (http://www.psiloc.com/index.html?id=155), allows you to change profiles automatically depending on your (approximate) location. The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) cellular network is serviced by a network of base stations. The area covered by each base station is known as a cell, which can be anywhere from 100 square meters in a crowded city to 3 square miles in the countryside. Using the area ID and the cell ID of the current base station, miniGPS determines the approximate position of the phone. For instance, if your office and home are more than 100 meters away from each other, they are likely to be serviced by base stations with different cell IDs.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Change Profiles Based on Time

Automatically change a profile based on time and location. This lets you make the phone adjust to its environment, without user intervention.

While changing the profile by hand is easy, many users still forget to do it. You often hear mobile phones ringing in meetingssomeone forgot to switch to their Meeting profile. Wouldn't it be nice if the phone could automatically switch to different profiles based on the time of day, or even the phone's location? Well, you can do that with Nokia smartphones.

Although it is easy to change profiles using the Power key, people still often forget to do so. It is embarrassing to have your phone ring in the middle of a movie or a presentation, and the scramble to find the phone in your bag or briefcase is comical at best. Using a small Symbian program from Psiloc, called Extended Profiles Pro (available for purchase from http://www.psiloc.com/index.html?id=156), you can change profiles at preset times on Series 60 devices.

Some non-Nokia devices support changing profiles based on calendar events. For instance, if the calendar knows you will be in a movie from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., the phone can be automatically switched to the Meeting profile during that time. Unfortunately, this functionality is not available on Nokia phones.

Extended Profiles Pro does not support Series 40 devices. However, the Series 40 native profile manager allows you to set an expiration time for each profile when you activate it

How to Prioritize Your Callers?


You have probably noticed that the profile personalization screen has an option called "Alert for." That is a very useful option, despite its cryptic name. You can use it to decide whose calls to take when a particular profile is activated. For instance, you can set up a special Meeting profile that rings only when your boss (or your spouse) calls and ignores all other incoming calls.

The Nokia Contacts list allows you to group your contacts into several different caller groups. You can click each group name to view and edit its membership or change its name. Caller groups are supported on Series 40 devices as well.

For each profile, you can specify one or several caller groups in the "Alert for" option. The phone will alert you only when a member of one of these groups calls (or messages you), using the tones and volumes defined in the profile. It only lets through calls from my family and from people in Austin, Texas.

Profiles give you a lot of control over various forms of feedback, accepting calls from people you know and ignoring (ringing silently) calls from those you don't know, and they can prove to be a valuable way to manage your time effectively. One of the most irritating aspects of an always-on society is that people know you're always on. Using profiles to set some limits frees you from making that decision on a per-call basis.

Change Sound and Alert Settings on the Fly

Using profiles, you can change your phone's sound and alert settings with several quick clicks.

A profile is a collection of settings for the phone's ring tone, alert tones, sound volume, and vibrating alert. Using profiles, you can quickly change your phone's settings to adjust to your surroundings. For example, when you enter an important meeting, you can switch your phone into the Silent profile, which silences the ring tone and turns off all alerts, in one operation. On most Nokia devices, lightly pressing the Power button on the top of the handset brings up the available profiles. You can either use the navigation pad to select different profiles or simply tap the Power button multiple times to move the selection highlight down the list of profiles. Once you select a profile, hold down the power key or press OK (the left soft key) to activate the profile. This allows you to change profiles quickly with a minimal number of key presses.

In most professional environments, it is basic mobile phone etiquette to silence the ringer and to use vibrating alerts only. Profiles make this very easy to do.

Most phones have five built-in profiles: General, Silent, Meeting, Outdoor, and Pager. On Series 60 devices, you can customize the settings for any of these profiles using the Profiles application in the Main menu. On Series 40 devices, you can customize the profiles via the Settings Profiles Personalise menu. You can change the name of all the profiles except for the General profile.

The Keypad tone is the confirmation sound you hear when any key is pressed. The Keypad tone can get very annoying when you are working with other people in the same room. But if you turn off the Keypad tone, you will not hear the touchtone when you dial. Keep this trade-off in mind when you change those settings!

Changing profile settings is a matter of personal preference. For instance, I really need a "vibrating only" profile. So, on my devices, I always customize the Pager profile into a Vibrate profile. As a result, my phone vibrates for incoming calls, but does not make any sound, under any circumstances.

On Series 60 devices, changing the Ringing type to Silent turns off the sound for games and applications as well. On Series 40 devices, the game sound is separately configured in the Options menu for the games folder.

You can personalize profiles in many other ways as well. For example, you can change the phone's ring tone for each profile. I change the name of the Outdoor profile to Loud, and the Nokia default ring tone to something that sounds louder. The Loud profile makes sure that I can always hear when the phone rings, even if I've got music playing.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Control Any Mac Program

Now, you might be asking how Salling Clicker can support so many applications. Can it support any other applications that you want to control? The answer is probably yes.

A key feature of Salling Clicker is that it can invoke any AppleScript on the Mac. This allows it to potentially launch and control any program on the Mac. In fact, many third-party Salling Clicker scripts are available. They control everything from professional audio applications to telescopes. You can see a list of contributed scripts at http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Clicker/scripts20/index.html.

AppleScript is a scripting language on Mac OS 9 and OS X. It not only interacts with the operating system to launch and stop applications, but it also interacts with the applications themselves to provide specific services.

In the Salling Clicker control console in System Preferences, you can edit the controller categories and their associated AppleScripts.

You can click any AppleScript in the righthand column and open it in the system's AppleScript editor. The following listing shows the AppleScript to start and pause the DVD Player. It uses the SEC Helper application to display large gray alert messages on the Mac screen.

tell application "DVD Player"
if dvd state is playing then
pause dvd
tell application "SEC Helper"
show screen message "DVD Player" icon pause
end tell
else
set viewer full screen to true
activate
play dvd
tell application "SEC Helper"
show screen message "DVD Player" icon play
end tell
end if
return
end tell

By inspecting those source code files, you can learn the basics of AppleScript quickly and get started writing a remote controller for your favorite Mac applications.

Control the Mac System


Using the Salling Clicker program, you can move and click the mouse on the Mac using the navigation pad. This function is similar to that in ControlFreak. However, unlike ControlFreak, Salling Clicker does not display the computer screen on the phone. You can also adjust the system sound volume and sound balance from the mobile phone

Check Email and Read Blogs

You can launch the Mac Mail program and Ranchero Software's NetWireNews program (only the commercial version) from Salling Clicker.

This allows you to read email and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) syndicated blogs while you are away from your computer. For instance, you can leave the computer on your desk and read email from your couch.

Salling Clicker controls only the Mac programs. The email and RSS contents are downloaded and rendered by the Mac before they are streamed to and displayed on the phone.

Monday, May 5, 2008

WorldMate for Nokia S60 Symbian Platform Takes Off

By Anil Sharma
TMCnet Contributing Editor

WorldMate, a provider of mobile travel services for frequent fliers, has launched flight alerts for Nokia (News - Alert) S60 devices. The easy to use se service can save travelers from inconveniences due to flight delays and cancellations. WorldMate for S60 users now can automatically receive real-time updates directly on their mobile phones by simply entering their flight numbers directly into the mobile application.


“Our members rely on WorldMate (News - Alert) to deal with the ever increasing uncertainties of travel, and we’re pleased to answer the call of our S60 users, putting up-to-the-minute flight information in the palm of their hands,” said Nadav Gur, CEO of WorldMate. “From the beginning, we built WorldMate products to cater to the needs of the ultimate road warrior. With strain on the airline industry, and resulting flight delays at record levels, it’s more important than ever for business travelers to have a mobile solution that caters to their constant on-the-go lifestyle.”

WorldMate for S60 includes several services, such as weather, currency converter, world clocks and world maps, provided free of charge. Premium services, including comprehensive flight schedules and real-time flight alerts, are available via subscription at $4.95 per month or $49.95 per year.

Last month, WorldMate announced WorldMate Live for Windows Mobile, the first push travel service for Windows Mobile smartphones. WorldMate Live caters to today’s road warriors, managing their complete itineraries including travel arrangements and business meetings by pushing notifications of events that impact their schedules to their smartphones, in real time.

The Windows Mobile version supports all of the popular WorldMate Live services including pushed itinerary updates real time, flight alerts, flight schedules, weather forecasts, and other important travel information.

The WorldMate Live Windows Mobile client is built for Windows Mobile Standard Edition smartphones, such as BlackJack II by Samsung, the HTC S620, andMotorola’s ( News - Alert) MOTO Q class phones.

The WorldMate says its product line is the only travel service optimized for mobile devices, and provides frequent fliers all the travel services they need at home, work or on the go. Removing stress and paperwork from the travel experience while saving time and money, WorldMate turns a mobile device into a personal travel companion.

Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Control Presentations with your Smartphone


Salling Clicker acts as a remote control for Apple's Keynote and Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software. You can put the computer into presentation mode and use the navigation pad to move the slides forward and backward. In PowerPoint's presentation mode, the phone screen displays the speaker notes and the title of the next slide. These are extremely powerful tools for effective presentations.

Unlike ControlFreak, Salling Clicker does not display the slide image on the phone screen. But that is not a big issue, since you can also see the slide projected on the screen from anywhere in the room.



How to Control Video Players with your Smartphone?


Salling Clicker can control several popular video playback programs on the Mac. They include the following:

QuickTime player
Plays generic media files, such as .mov, .avi, and .mp3 files

DVDPlayer
Plays DVD movies

VLC player
An open source video player that plays media files, VCDs, and DVDs

eyeTV player
A player for cable or satellite TV programs captured from a TV capture and conversion card

The computer can play video content on its own display screen, or output S-Video signals to show on a standard TV. It displays the current movie information and the player timer. You can use the navigation pad to play and pause the movie. You can also use the More option to open new movie files and toggle the full-screen mode.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Nokia, S60 unveil 3 applications to boost mobile user experience

Nokia, in collaboration with S60, a global leader in smartphone software platform, announced the release of three new applications that promise to boost the mobile user experience to a different level. The three applications that are developed on the S60 platform comprise of – WaveSecure, Web Server and Quick Office.

WaveSecure is a security application for mobile phones that enable users not only to track their handset if lost or stolen, but also creates a backup for the phone data via the internet. Web Server allows consumers to access their mobile phones via internet with facilities such as accessing recent call logs, photo gallery and etc.

The last application, Quick Office lets all Nokia E90 users edit their MS office documents using the phone.

Whilst announcing the new applications, Mahmood Kalantar, Director-Business Development, Mobile Software Sales & Marketing, Nokia APAC said, “S60 on Symbian OS offers a great platform to innovate with user applications. We see experiences converging, and people demanding more and more of the functionalities that smartphones offer, both of which highlight the significance of ease of use. The focus of our strategy is to give people choice and simplicity - key to delivering the best user experiences to add value to people’s lives”.

Along with the three applications, Nokia also unveiled four applications- Mundu IM from Geodesic; SMS Scheduler and Smart Assistant Live from Aims Migital and Voice reminder from OneView Systems, all of which have been developed in India.

How to Control iPhoto from Smartphone?


Salling Clicker can launch iPhoto from the phone and then display any photo in the iPhoto library. The photo is displayed on the screens of both the Mac computer and the phone. It also starts photo slideshows. If you have a projector, this could make an excellent remote control for a photo demonstration. You can move to the next or previous photo using the phone navigation pad. Again, the slideshow pictures are shown on the phone screen as well, allowing you to view the show while you are away from the Mac

How to Control iTunes from your Smartphone


The most commonly used feature of Salling Clicker is to control music playback via the iTunes software. From the phone UI, you can select the playlists and songs to play. The current song's name, album, artist information, and cover art image, if available, are displayed on the phone.

You can also rate the songs right on the phone. This is much more convenient than rating songs in the iTunes window, which requires you to interrupt your workflow and switch the currently active window to iTunes during playback. I have found myself rating songs much more frequently on the phone remote control.

With the Apple Airport Express device, you can stream audio from the iTunes library to any connected stereo speakers via the local WiFi network. Using the Salling Clicker remote control, you can make a Mac in the living room play music on a kitchen stereo while you are working in the kitchen.

Another cool Salling Clicker feature is that it pauses the iTunes playback when you pick up an incoming call, which minimizes interference.