Customizing Your Treo: Wallpaper
As you might know, you can have any image or picture appear as the wallpaper on your default ‘Phone’ screen instead of the standard dial pad.
The way to do this is to go to the Phone screen (call answer button) then in the menu select Options > General Preferences. There you’ll be presented with the option to either ‘Show Dial Pad’ or ‘Show Wallpaper’.
Select ‘show wallpaper’ and then click on the square next to it. This will take you to ‘Select Picture’ from internal and external SD card storage. All images on the SD card must be placed in the DCIM folder and to make it easier to find the images that I want I created a new subfolder called ‘Wallpaper’.
However, there’s something that I discovered in the process. Namely, the wallpaper image that you select will not be automatically resized to fit the available space and the ensuing ‘cropping’ may leave you a little annoyed – I would basically label this as a bug.
As you can see from the screenshots below, a normal 320x320 image will get cropped at the top and bottom. Furthermore, if you decide to select Show Favorite buttons with 1 or more rows you’ll have even more cropping rendering your original image progressively useless.
Nevertheless, there is a way to create an image that will fit just right (albeit with only 1 Favorite buttons row) and where no cropping will occur. You’ll need an image editor (I use Adobe Photoshop Elements but Paint.net is another free option [Thanks grovberg]) to resize the height of your image to 230 pixels (the width will vary proportionally). Then you’ll need to paste that resized image on a 320x320 sized canvas (the background can be of any colour) so that it finally fits uncropped as your wallpaper.
I wish that there was an easier way to explain this. The process is without a doubt a painful one even though it actually takes less than 10 minutes to implement if you have all of the right pieces. Undoubtedly, palmOne/PalmSource could have developed it in such a way that a correct resize of the image would work automatically thus saving us from doing any of this but I guess that we’ll have to wait until next time for that.
At present, if like me you’d like to personalize your Treo 650 with your own photo or image and make sure that it fits perfectly then you’ll have no other alternative but to resize your selected wallpaper image.
Finally, if you have currently been using the dial pad and wonder how you can get access to it once your wallpaper image is installed all you have to do is simply press any of the numbers on your keyboard or alternatively you can select ‘Dial Pad’ as one of the buttons in the Favorites.
You may also like to read another option to personalize your Treo: Make your Treo Work and Play More Colorful with Khroma
Treonauts will always find the bugs…
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Comments
Paint.Net is a free image editor that can accomplish this task.
grovberg - thanks a lot for the tip. Paint.net looks like a very powerful application and the fact that its free certainly makes it appealing.
The URL to download it is at http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/index.htm
Cheers, W.
There is an even easier way to resize pictures in scale with a windows XP powertoy "Image Resizer"
Image Resizer
This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe
NRG - Thanks for the powertoy tip. However, the main issue is not so much the resizing required than the copy/pasting that resized image unto a larger 320x320 canvas.
Cheers, A.
hi,
sorry if this is in the wrong place. is there any was to change the name of an application so that it groups differently in the application page? e.g. i put Noah dictionary and thesaurus which show up as "Noah" and "thesaurus"- can i change it to "Noah thesaurus" so they are together? i used rescoe to change the name in the RAM memory, but it still appears as only "thesaurus" on the app page.
thanks.
Hi, there is a website where you can donwload Treo wallpapers (320x320 pixels) based on professional photos. It's nice. www.hightoon.com
Here is free resizer and program to add captions
this really helped but you should say to tap the top of the page when going to general prefrences it was confusing at first, but none the less, your advice helped alot.
heya i get to the second pic were u choose opition and my fones is not lettin me choose it. it will only stay at record and wont move along, do you know how i kan do it? i kant use my touch scene as it is not working, cheers
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