[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] Osprey00:
If anyone's interested in an almost-exact clone of the iPhone background, here are ones for 240x320 and 272x480 that I whipped up. For WM devices, you may need to take a little off of the top if the taskbar displaces the start of iPhoneToday and this background. I don't have a WM device, so I don't know.

tronikos,

1. I see, from the Google Moderator voting, that a few other people like the idea of allowing for individual, transparent backgrounds on the top and bottom bars. The usefulness of that would be that we wouldn't have to do what I did above and burn the background that we want for the bottom (or top) bar into the main background, which immediately limits the background to a single background (since the part meant to go behind the bar likely wouldn't line up nicely after resizing). You could then include the metal background with iPT and put it behind the bottom bar by default so that people really get the iPhone look out-of-the-box. Also, supporting alpha-transparent PNGs would be really nice so that we could do effects like this (without it being static, i.e. in this case, the Earth scrolling behind the alpha transparent metal background):

I know that you said that it's easier said than done, but, the way that I figure, the bottom and top bar icons can already be alpha-transparent PNGs that the background shows through, even while scrolling, so this doesn't really seem to be much different. The bar background could, essentially, be another layer drawn similarly to the bar icons, but between the bar icons and the main background. You might even, if you had to, come up with a trick of adding duplicate bottom and top bars just underneath the existing ones and using those for the background (of course, though, just exposing them to the program and settings file as backgrounds for the bars, not really as separate bars). Anyways, that would be really cool, not just for me, but a lot of people, I imagine. I don't mean to bug you about this, but I now see a few others wanting such a feature and I believe that you could do it if you feel that it's useful enough, so I wanted to help show again that it is, IMO. Thanks for at least considering it again.

2. Auto-configure appears to reset the mainscreen offsets. I have a settings.xml in which I set the mainscreen's top offset to 15 to provide room for the headers that I have declared in icons.xml. If I leave AlreadyConfigured on 0 and let iPT auto-configure, though, that offset is lost and the default value of 5 is used, resulting in the headers showing up mostly behind the mainscreen's top row of icons. It'd be nice if auto-configure would preserve settings like that and factor them into the calculation.

3. Auto-configure also resets the font size when you have it set to 0. Certainly, it should pick a font size that's good for the resolution, but, if it's set to 0, it should leave it 0. Actually, this is a good thing to check for with all values. If a value is set to 0, auto-configure shouldn't touch it.

4. This is a strange one. On my device (a PND, as you know), the scrolling is quite a bit choppier in portrait mode than in landscape (and, FYI, I don't test in portrait much, so my guess is that it's always been like this). It's not unusable, but significant. It's not the number of visible icons, which is identical. I even turned off the top and bottom bars to test. It's also not which orientation I launch iPT in. It's not iPT, is it? Could it be making some assumption that being in portrait mode means a WM device and, thus, uses some settings/functions that ordinarily aren't used in landscape mode in the PND version? If not, could it be that gwes.exe is set for a particular orientation (landscape in my case) and, when rotating the screen, it has to go through extra calculations to "emulate" portrait mode? Do you have a better idea of what could be going on and if there's anything that can be done about it? Thanks.

5. Is there any trick that you can do (perhaps call a library function) to smooth fonts on PNDs which don't support ClearType? As you've probably noticed in the emulator, the fonts don't look so good without it. It's not so bad at size 12, but you can see in my screenshot above that it looks pretty bad when larger than that (ex. on the special icons... calendar, clock, battery, etc.). You've proven that there are many methods for displaying and interpolating images, so maybe there's an alternate method for fonts. It's at least worth my asking about. Thanks.