Reader app with day night adjustable settings

[pruss]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

Interesting discussion, but my only Android device is a Honeycomb tablet which claims
to adjust the brightness using a hardware sensor then the firmware/software settings.
Would that not effect your efforts, if there were something like that in play for your
devices?

SuperDim turns off the automatic brightness when you use it for setting the screen brightness.

[yelloguy]

Originally Posted by pruss

I suspect that your Nook may well be waking up just fine, but with a brightness set to zero, so you can't see anything. :-) I don't know if you have any way of checking if that's what's happening. But if that really is what is happening, I think I can work around the problem in SuperDim.

That said, I am still a bit surprised the brightness lock works for you. Maybe it depends on the app? Can you try an experiment for me? Set the correct brightness in SuperDim, and exit SuperDim. Then, using either a terminal app or an adb shell, execute the following commands:
su
chmod 444 /sys/class/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness
(You'll probably get a root privileges prompt after the "su".) Then see if that locks in the brightness for you.

I suspected the same but couldn't think of a way to find out. I am a developer but I don't develop for Android. So I do not have the SDK to do what you said above.

The brightness lock works across all apps. I tried it. Most apps don't adjust brightness so the setting is moot. But almost all the ereaders save their own brightness and after I lock it, none of them can change it.

I wish there was an unlock button. So I could lock, read, unlock and sleep.

[pruss]

You don't need an SDK. Just download a terminal app from the Market or some other place, and type the commands in.

I'll make you a deal. You try it for me, and I'll look into adding a lock feature to SuperDim, with a pre-sleep unlocker.

[yelloguy]

pruss, the command did the trick. And I don't need the button now since changing the brightness again in your app resets the read-only flag and I can sleep the device properly.

So, I downloaded your app. Set the brightness to 10%. Then I went to the terminal app and entered the command you gave. Then I tried nook app and it did not adjust brightness. Just to be sure, I tried the Kindle app and that behaved the same. The brightness slider did not change the brightness.

Now I panicked because I did not know how to unlock the brightness. I thought I will look up the man page for chmod but before that, I tried changing the brightness in your app. And it worked. Now the two readers could change brightness too.

Next, I tried to lock the brightness in AdjBrightness and it worked like it always has. But it could not change it after the lock. So I guess I will need your app to do the unlock. When you add the lock button, I would not need AdjBrightness anymore.

--

BTW, I guess I have sleep of death because AdjBrightness tries to set brightness every time I wake up the device from sleep. But if the brightness file is readonly (due to the brightness lock set by AdjBrightness itself) it is unable to set it. You can code around that.

[pruss]

Originally Posted by yelloguy

pruss, the command did the trick. And I don't need the button now since changing the brightness again in your app resets the read-only flag and I can sleep the device properly.

So, I downloaded your app. Set the brightness to 10%. Then I went to the terminal app and entered the command you gave. Then I tried nook app and it did not adjust brightness. Just to be sure, I tried the Kindle app and that behaved the same. The brightness slider did not change the brightness.

Interesting. I just did basically the same on my A43 and the brightness slider in the Kindle app has no difficulty changing the brightness.

Anyway, I will be happy to add a lock button, if I can find a place on the screen to fit it! (No problem on your Nook, but some people have smaller screens.)

Here is the functioning I envisage. When the lock function is on, SuperDim locks the brightness control after exiting. It then unlocks it when the device has turned its screen off (I hope it won't block the screen from turning off; from what you said, it only blocks the screen turning on; but that may differ from device to device maybe). And it then re-locks it when the device has turned off.

You can always do an emergency unlock by rebooting, since SuperDim does not start up on boot. (That's a deliberate choice in case someone sets brightness to a level so low that nothing can be seen on the screen.)

[yelloguy]

Originally Posted by pruss

Here is the functioning I envisage. When the lock function is on, SuperDim locks the brightness control after exiting. It then unlocks it when the device has turned its screen off (I hope it won't block the screen from turning off; from what you said, it only blocks the screen turning on; but that may differ from device to device maybe). And it then re-locks it when the device has turned off.

Not sure I follow. Technically you don't need to do anything when the device turns itself off or on. I suspect AdjBrightness does that to retain the brightness setting across sleep sessions. Every time I wake up the device I get a notification that AdjBrightness has been granted root permissions.

I am not sure if the device resets brightness on every wake up. If so, you need to make sure you set brightness on every wake up but unlike AdjBrightness, your app overrides the lock anyway. So you don't need to do anything extra if you set it on every wake up already.

[pruss]

Well, didn't you say that if you turn it off with the lock activated, the device doesn't turn back on? If I understood that correctly, it means we need to deactivate the lock whenever the device turns off, to prevent the device from getting stuck in a screen-off state, right?

[pruss]

There is locking in 1.31pre1. http://code.google.com/p/superdim/downloads/list

It tries to unlock at power-off, so you shouldn't get the locked-off problem.

[yelloguy]

pruss, this works very well indeed! I can now lock the screen brightness in SuperDim and then switch to a reading app. After I am done reading, I can jump back to SuperDim and unlock the screen brightness before putting the device to sleep. If I forget (or intentionally, as I experimented once) to unlock the brightness, the device fails to wake up. But that was expected. I can now get rid of the AdjBrightness.

Thanks so much for doing this. This makes Nook Color perfect for me: thanks to ezPdf for reading PDF's, Nook App and your app for reading epubs.

[pruss]

Originally Posted by yelloguy

pruss, this works very well indeed! I can now lock the screen brightness in SuperDim and then switch to a reading app. After I am done reading, I can jump back to SuperDim and unlock the screen brightness before putting the device to sleep. If I forget (or intentionally, as I experimented once) to unlock the brightness, the device fails to wake up. But that was expected. I can now get rid of the AdjBrightness.

Thanks so much for doing this. This makes Nook Color perfect for me: thanks to ezPdf for reading PDF's, Nook App and your app for reading epubs.

The not waking up is a problem. If you can install adb on your device ( http://nookdevs.com/ADB_Over_USB_(Nook_Classic) ), you can do this for me.

Hook your Nook to your PC. Make sure you can connect to it with adb (type "adb devices" on your PC to see if it's listed). Type "adb logcat > log.txt" on the PC. Set the lock. Exit SuperDim. Press the powerbutton to turn off. Wait 15 seconds. Press it again to turn on. I assume it won't turn on. Wait 15 seconds. Press CTRL-C on the PC. Email me log.txt (arpruss@gmail.com).