I spent a couple of hours today trying to resolve a strange behavior on my Kyocera 7135...
Even though I've had the 7135 for over a year now, I didn't notice this behavior until after I had installed "Crazy Daisy" from AstraWare, which, by the way, is totally addictive! I don't think the game is the cause of the behavior, I just think that it allowed me to notice the behavior.
Anyway, the behavior in question is that after a reset of the device, it comes up in what I believe is 16 bit color depth (65K colors). After I hot sync, it appears that the device switches to 8 bit color depth (256 colors). I have not been able to find anything which displays the current color depth, so I don't know for sure, but I can say that the colors seem more varied and more vibrant before I hot sync, than afterward.
I searched and searched for a utility to either display the current color depth setting, or to allow me to reset it on-the-fly. I thought I had found one in either "Colorize" or "Butterfly," but though either appears to allow adjusting the color depth, neither seemed to do anything on the 7135 - at least not as far as my perception of the base colors was concerned. Sure, they did adjust the colors of scroll bars, menu bars, etc. - but that's not really what I was looking for. I did find a reference to a "VideoModeHack" by Robert Diamond, which seemed like it would do everything I wanted, but I could not find anywhere from which to download it.
I also found ZLauncher which appears to have some controls for color depth as a small part of its functionality, but I'm still deciding if I really want to install it and change the whole user interface - although it does look like a really cool program.
I also installed McColors and "Screen Prefs" from Mike McCollister at http://mikemccollister.com/palm/ and thought for a moment that they would do the trick, but... no.
I am starting to think that it is a bug in the version of the Palm OS that Kyocera implemented - that once the color depth is changed, only a reboot will reset it.
I did find a nifty free little application that allows me to reset the device via the screen rather than having to remove the battery cover - it is called, strangely enough "Reset" by CHZ-Soft. It still is a hassle because every time I reset, I have to go through the digitizer/screen calibration, but, I guess it's better than nothing.
I also found a cool little freeware application that allows searching the text of the memo database called Q-Pocket for Palm by Toshiyuki Masui, and a shareware application called Memo Leaf which offers search in addition to some other nice enhancements for the built-in memo application. It had always bugged me that the built-in memo application did not have a find or seach feature, given the extensive use I make of it to help me remember the important tidbits of data that are no longer so efficiently maintained or retreived in my wetware. Now, I have one less thing to be bugged about.
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Posted by David at August 07, 2005 08:25 PM