by Duane Aubin
Click any image to enlarge it.

There are apps that do many things. Then there are apps that do one thing, and do it well. One app that simply does what it says is Visual Arts from Toysoft. With minimal hiccups it really does provide for a more pleasurable user experience on my Treo 650.

Visual Arts allows the user to select a folder of images (which it will automatically scroll through) to use as wallpaper in the phone application. Did I mention it’s a fairly basic app? Here’s the control screen that greets you when you launch it.

You can set it to randomize the display of images or just use them in order. You can set it to change at a regular timed interval or on every launch.

I tried the timed interval and it didn’t seem to work (not sure whether it assumes real time or time actually elapsed while in the phone application itself).

Set to change on launch, it worked well. Currently it’s pointing at the “family” folder, and I’m greeted with the bright smiles of my wife and kids, and warm ‘n’ fuzzy memories whenever I launch the phone app.

The supported image type is JPG, which is the default format for the Treo camera. There was a slight delay in launching the phone after pressing the phone button, but that was fixed by selecting the “Use Visual Arts jpg library” under preferences.

I mentioned a few “hiccups”. One curious thing was that the image rendering was somewhat messed up until I checked the “Use Visual Arts JPG Library option. To be more technical, it was actually splicing two images into one, so I got the top 2/3rds of one image and the bottom 3rd of another. Weird. But, after checking that box, no more image problems. Why it did this, or how this check box fixes it, I’ve no idea, but given that my images look ok, I figure why bug ‘em? I’m not a high maintenance user.

As is so often the case, we scratch our heads and wonder why Palm’s phone app didn’t provide this functionality natively? It does invite you to go ahead and select an image as wallpaper - the natural next step would have been to support some kind of rotation. But, it’s probably a good thing that Palm creates the opportunity for 3rd parties to compete in the developer space. It provides employment for the developers, and variety and choice for the user who gets to choose the particular application that “works for me.”

Will Visual Arts make you a more efficient, productive person? Probably not. But then, if you have a set of images that make you smile, laugh, or just generally make you feel good, you might be able to attend to your work with less stress, more clarity, and presto! - Visual Arts may yet become known as a performance enhancer after all.

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