Rotating Screen and the background

[courtmagician]

With all the devices out there that have the sliding keyboard and the automatically rotating screen, is there a utility that will allow you to change the background image on rotation? Or maybe something that will stretch the image rather than just trying to center it?

[Darius Wey]

If a theme was created using only a 240 x 320 picture (or if you're using a VGA device, then 480 x 640), then it won't stretch to fit the length of the display when you switch to landscape mode. Themes should at least ship with 320 x 320 (or 640 x 640) pictures to accommodate landscape mode. It's not something you can control from an end-user perspective, unless you acquire a theme editing package.

[courtmagician]

With that in mind, I tried 2 different background images and set them as my background. One was 480x640, and it did get "stretched' (more like shrunk) to fit the 240x320 screen, but when I rotated the screen, it simply kept the file in it's new 240 width and tiled the image. So thinking that perhaps the system was looking for something that was 320 in width, I edited the same image down to 320 width and got the same result.

Because I'm not using a theme editor, it could simply mean that whenever I set a picture to my new background, the software is converting it to 240x320, or it could be the system doing that.

[Darius Wey]

Unfortunately, background image support in Windows Mobile isn't stellar. The OS is very picky about making your images fit the screen correctly.

Theme editors do a slightly better job. If you do get around to playing with one, keep in mind that the themes do not automatically scale images to fit your screen resolution. So if you embed a 480 x 640 image in a theme with the intention of using it on a 240 x 320 device, you'll see the top-left portion of the image, not the entire image. It is often the reason why artists release two versions of a theme - one for QVGA and one for VGA. But it also helps QVGA users avoid unnecessarily large file sizes.

[Nurhisham Hussein]

This is the main reason why I've always made my own themes, just to get around that portrait/landscape problem.

[juni]

Yes, so do I. 640x640 for VGA and 320x320 for QVGA :). I actually make themes by editing the inf files by hand and making the theme with a batch file :).

[BoxWave]

This is the main reason why I've always made my own themes, just to get around that portrait/landscape problem.

mhm.