On September 27, 2004 07:41 pm, Robert Hildinger wrote: > Greetings all, > > I know this doesn't really have much to do with PalmOS development, but > it's something I've always been curious about. Why do all color PalmOS > devices have a two-pixel width, unaddressable white border around their > screens? Is there any way to turn it off? Are PalmSource licensees required > to use screens like this, and doesn't it make it difficult to get new > screens from OEMs that have resolutions like 324x324 or 324x484? > > I actually find it kind of irritating in some cases as it detracts from the > visual presentation of certain programs. Does anyone have any thoughts on > the matter? > > -Robert Hildinger
The reason for the border is quite simple - original B&W devices were 160x160 and relied on reflective LCD to display the pixels. Developers were told to create objects right up to the edge of the screen. When the devices became backlit, a "black" border on a button near the screen edge would look quite bad, so they added a border. I've noticed that in newer devices, it's two pixels, but in the "olden" days, it was simply an edge which the backlight overlapped past the screen. It may be addressible - my T3's backlight, for example, shows that there are pixels there. You'll just need to toggle them yourself (memory mapped LCD controllers and all) - or the border may be addressible in the same way the old textmode DOS border was - changing a background color... The possibilities abound, but in general, there's no helping it. The only cases which I have run into where the border is "bad" is when reading books inverted and playing games which have a black background. More if a detraction from display quality, to me, are applications which blatently ignore standard UI design for PalmOS. Not naming any names, but many of the Word-alike programs are pretty bad. Using RsrcEdit (no longer available for "free") I customized WordSmith rather heavily and improved it substantially. And yes, the cost of the display would suffer due to the extra pixels, unless OEMs really are using 320x320 pixel screens and are just extending the backlight farther (i.e. by using a masked area exactly two pixels wide on each side). -- Matthew Bevan, Margin Software - Re-inventing the wheel, every time. FYI - Finagle's fourth Law: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse. -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
