Enhance Your Pocket PC Experience

Looking to take full advantage of your Pocket PC? Here are a few applications and simple tips that are sure to enhance your Pocket PC experience!

PALBUM PICTURE VIEWER--SIMPLE PHOTO ALBUM SOLUTION

The Pocket PC marketplace has recently been flooded with photo-viewing software solutions. Unfortunately, most of the available applications use unique interfaces that take valuable time to master. Palbum Picture Viewer is my new favorite due to its simple approach to finding, browsing, and viewing images.

Palbum Picture Viewer makes it easy to find, browse, and view images.

When you first open Palbum, it displays the My Documents directory on your Pocket PC and shows thumbnails of all the images located in that folder. If you would like to find images in another directory, you can click on a folder icon to open a directory navigation menu. If you change directories and close Palbum Picture Viewer, that new directory will open the next time you launch the application. In other words, it remembers the last pictures that you were browsing--saving you the time it takes to navigate back to the last viewed directory.

Below the thubnail viewing area and to the right of the Tools menu there are two buttons. The first is a refresh button to reload the current directory and show any images you may have just moved into that folder. The second toggles between the thumbnail view and a list of file names. If you are viewing a directory with hundreds of images, you may not want to wait for all the thumbnails to appear. Palbum Picture Viewer will only show a list of file names for images if you disable thumbnail view.

To view any image by itself, simply tap the thumbnail or file name. If the image is too big to fit the screen, you will only see the top left portion of the image. However, if you drag your stylus in the direction you would like to move the image it will move, displaying another part of the image in the viewing area. If you prefer, you can change the program's options to shrink full images to fit the screen.

When Palbum Picture Viewer has an image open, five toolbar buttons and two menus are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

• The Fullscreen button hides (and unhides) all menus and toolbars, displaying the image full-screen.
• The Previous and Next buttons navigate back and forth through the images in the directory you are browsing.
• The Fit to Screen button resizes the image to fit the current display area without changing the width to height ratio.
• The Smart Rotation button causes all landscape images to auto-rotate for a better fit on the portrait-shaped viewing screen. Thus, with fit-to-screen and smart rotation enabled, you will be able to view oversize or horizontal images without scrolling.
• The View menu at the bottom left of the screen gives you even more control over how you view your images. It has options to display an image at 12%, 25%, 50%, 100%, and 200% of its original size. You can also rotate an image left or right (with smart rotation disabled), check image properties, or start a slideshow of all the images in the current folder. This allows you to customize the view to fit your needs using one simple menu.
• The Tools menu lets you set options for individual pictures, thumbnails, plug-ins, and slideshows.