Ipod 4G grayscale backlight/brightness issues

[punchcutter]

I have a few questions, issues related to backlight and brightness on my 4G.  These are all the more significant because of the relatively poor battery life we get on this model.  I'm really surprised not to find more discussion and requests for these features on the forum.

I note that brightness adjustment has recently been enabled for a couple ipod models, but not this one.  Does anyone know if this is being worked on?  Personally I find the default brightness (probably the max) to be FAR brighter than I ever need.  I just need to see what's on the screen, not light up a nighttime football game.  I'd be satisfied even if there were some fairly esoteric way to set this value under the hood, even if it weren't accessible via the UI.

Especially (again) because of battery life concerns, I always turn my backlight off in the daytime and on at night.  Having to drill down five levels of menu to do this is a pain the butt, to say the least.  To me this is a gimme to include on the quick menu.  Has anyone ever considered putting it on there?  It wouldn't even need to be the whole timer value selection... just on or off, and the timer value setting could remain where it is.

(Incidentally, it seems the quick menu is only available from WPS, not from the menu screens - is that deliberate?)

Thanks,
Dave

[shoe]

Having to drill down five levels of menu to do this is a pain the butt, to say the least.

You might try making two config files with the backlight settings you want, then you can use them to change the settings more quickly.  Note: cfg files can be put anywhere on your drive for quick access.

(Incidentally, it seems the quick menu is only available from WPS, not from the menu screens - is that deliberate?)

Not only from the WPS screen, but from the database screens, and the file browser screens as well.

[AlexP]

Has anyone ever considered putting it on there?  It wouldn't even need to be the whole timer value selection... just on or off, and the timer value setting could remain where it is.

You are going to find everyone will want different things on the quick menu.  Personally, I just set the backlight once and never touch it again, so would be very much against having it on the quickscreen.

Try investigating the cfg route as shoe suggested.

[shoe]

A while back there was a commit for a customizable quickscreen (r16220), but it was broken, so they reverted it.  Maybe it will be fixed sometime soon (hope, hope).

[punchcutter]

Thanks for the responses.  I hadn't noticed the use of configuration files before.  It works well... still a bit of drill down, but much better than before.  And this really helps with not having to completely reconfigure all my settings every time I upgrade the firmware     For some reason it hadn't quite occurred to me that that was not a natural state of affairs either...

I think a customizable quick menu or (partially) customizable main menu would be a good idea.  I hope they bring back this idea.

Dave

[Llorean]

You can click on .cfg files from anywhere in the file manager, and have them load. You don't have to drill down to them, as you put it, you can simply place them wherever you like.

As for reconfiguring your software each time you upgrade, your config settings should not be lost on a Rockbox upgrade. Are you for some reason deleting the old .rockbox folder first?

[punchcutter]

Thanks for the hints.  Yes, I was doing an rm -rf on the .rockbox folder, just to be conservative. I wasn't sure what would happen if I tried to unzip a new version on top of an existing one.  Thought it might break things. I'll probably continue to do that now that I know how to save the settings, even if you say it's unnecessary

Dave

[shoe]

I recommend unzipping over the old .rockbox folder, not only will this save all your settings automatically, it will save all your database information and statistics (no need to re-initialize), and any custom themes you downloaded, custom keyboard layout, custom database viewing options in the tagnavi_custom.config, etc...