I recently changed the background image for the Today screen on my XDA Orbit, however when you set an image to background it washes it out with a grey layer so that text is still readable. However, if you used a very light image to begin with, the standard white text of the Today screen becomes almost unreadable.

In true Microsoft style, there’s no way to change this easily through the Settings pane, or through the Theme settings pane either. So how do you do it?

1. Download Mobile Registry Editor
2. Make sure your phone is connected over ActiveSync
3. Load Mobile Registry Editor
4. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Color\

If you see a binary key named 4 simply edit that and if you want the colour black, put in 00 00 00 00 then save it.

If you don’t see a binary key named 4 then you’ll need to create it. Do this by right clicking and going to New -> Binary Value…

Value Name: 4
Value Data: 00 00 00 00

If you had to create the key then the colour change should be immediate, if you were editing it you probably need to restart the phone.

This video is shows off what Microsoft’s Research team have been doing since they initially did work on an idea called Photo Tourism. This is where you take lots of photo’s of a location and using those to generate a 3D area which the user can move the camera about in. This is the next step up from that with many improvements, and quite frankly, is a fantastic bit of software engineering.

Well, this is something I’ve been trying to work out how to do for quite a while, I had browsed the entire file system of the phone through Windows, and by looking at it specifically through the phone, but couldn’t find anything as to where it stored SMS text messages. I have over 4,500 text messages on my phone, and I have made it a habit of mine to never delete anything, this includes every e-mail I send and receive and all IRC channels.

So when Apple announced the iPhone 3g, I needed to find a way to save or backup these messages, otherwise they’ll be lost forever and stuck on this little XDA Orbit. o2 came to a possible rescue with their Bluebook website, however this only backs up messages once you sign in and agree to it, no storing things from the past. You can however send it new messages, but im not going to forward it 3000 text’s, no only will it take me forever, itll probably cost me a kidney (or 2).

Instead of the obvious health problems I would get after doing that, I started Googling for a solution, and it seems that quite a few people want to be able to backup their txt messages from their Windows Mobile phones. Luckily after a little time I managed to find something partly useful which just about does the job while providing a few extra little functions.

This program is called Jeyo Mobile Extender, this allows you to backup all your text messages from your phone into Outlook. It also provides you with a way of responding to text messages through that, so if you have your phone connected via ActiveSync no longer do you have to reply through that! It’s SMS downloader however is a little buggy, when telling it to download every text message I have it took a little while to think about it, then just crashed out telling me my phone was not connected. I then found a way to tell it to download certain text messages from certain folders, and it seemed to be much happier doing it this way.

This appears to be a nice solution to a problem lots of people are having, and seems to work quite well, other than in the extremes of thousands of messages. Either way, i’ll be using this until my new iPhone arrives!

Although that bodes the next problem… how do I transfer these text messages onto an iPhone? Doh!

It’s going to be that time of year again soon, when a browser gets updated and all developers frantically have to make their websites compatible and all working fantastically. However, this time around the team behind Internet Explorer 8 are going to make this much easier on all us devs.

They are doing this by allowing the web-site itself to control which rendering engine IE8 will use when you browse. This will mean if you site is already compatible with IE7, it can also be compatible with IE8 by simply including one line of HTML in the header…

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

This will apparently force newer version of IE8 to render the current page in IE7’s format, which from a standpoint on the priority of getting things upgraded, can allow it to go a few notches down on the list rather than being the number one.

For once it will be nice to worry about feature sets, improvements and bug fixing rather than worrying if the styling will still work when the next version of IE comes out.

Thank you Microsoft IE team!

I’m currently mainly coding in PHP still (love live PHP!) because I find being able to mock up pages or programs quickly is a god send, especially since Rubem Pechansky created a wonderful extension called WinBinder. Which allows you to create client side applications extremly quickly, think how easy mIRC dialogs were, and then put that with PHP, and you can make some very powerful programs. Rapid client side application development with PHP *glee*. Here’s a quote from their web-site about it…

“WinBinder is an open source extension to PHP, the script programming language. It allows PHP programmers to easily build native Windows applications, producing quick and rewarding results with minimum effort. Even short scripts with a few dozen lines can generate a useful program, thanks to the power and flexibility of PHP.“