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Quite some time ago I was reviewing Live Wallpaper for Nokia N900, I wasn’t amused by this interface modification, it was buggy and not my style. But it moved forward quite a lot and allows to do few new, nice things.
At first glance Live Wallpaper welcomes you with Matrix-like falling letters on you first homescreen. But the most important thing hides in settings panel, where you can set different live wallpapers for every homescreen. The choice is quite wide, including standard wallpapers like matrix  falling letters or few city views or even X screensavers (if you install additional package Xscreensavers for Livewallpaper), well known from desktop computers and even this is not the best thing!
When you choose Flash from LiveWallpaper category you can set your own flash animation as homescreen wallpaper. Visit flash wallpapers talk.maemo.org thread and check available examples. I’ve tried with the first one, Warld of Warcraft wallpaper. Is just as simple as: download the .swf file, upload it to any directory on your N900, go to settings panel and in Live Wallapaper settings use LiveWallpaper category and Flash theme, when you can set the path to your custom flash animation. And voila, you have your own, animated desktop!
This small modification looks really fancy, but every superhero knows that great power comes with great responsibility. It’s constantly played flash animation, so you can expect a bit more CPU usage than without it, it’s up to you.
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MJ

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Some of you ask for specific wallpapers on our Nokia N900 forum wallpapers section. Some of you tend to ask on our Facebook news feed. Well, I’m not an artist, but I can use my skills to at least try to fullfill your needs. Here’s small example of what I can do.
Lord of the Rings
Request for this wallpaper, or more specifically for ‘Return of the King‘, appeared on our forum from elessar32. I’m more in book than the movie, but I can improvise something. In my opinion such wallpaper should look ‘meedieval’ and dark, I hope you aggree that it’s epic story with dark background, so I’ve made something like this:
Inglorious Basterds
Request was posted in our Facebook feed and to be honest I don’t look there often so if you have some ideas, please post them as comments, will be surely more visible for me. Nevertheless I’ve seen the movie, I liked it, but had no idea what wallpaper should look like, so I’ve googled a bit. I’ve found some pictures over the net and compiled them into something simple, but containing some relevant details, just have a look:
Images above should be available to be set as ‘Image set’ wallpaper if you just upload to your N900 wallpaper directory and wait a moment to let them be indexed. If you want something else, or you don’t like my idea feel free to comment, maybe I’ll try to improve my work next time and make something more suitable for your needs.
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MJ
Win Solar Charger by posting on our Nokia N900 forum

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Welcome back in theme review series. Long time no see, but more themes coming and more to review, so let’s see what can we have in Carbon theme for Nokia N900.
Carbon theme, as the name says, makes user interface look line modern machines built with carbon fiber. Dark grey motif looks pretty clean with bright, contrasting font colors. Carbon fiber structure appears as background in most important applications like App manager or Media Player and in homescreen, making it clean and tidy. Buttons mostly look smaller than in most themes, their background makes them look like leveled with rest of interface with groove around. Text colors are nicely cooperating with dark background. White letters for main elements and blue for minor are visible and easily readable.
In my opinion such set of colors and widget looks doesn’t tire eyes, it’s easy to work with such theme even for long time. Carbon theme makes good duo with black-grey-blue-white coloured wallpapers, like Bleach wallpaper I’ve made some time ago. Try it yourself and if you’re looking for theme for your own wallpaper see other reviewed themes and feel free to ask, I’ll try to find of maybe even make such theme.
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MJ

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After some time spend on N900 customization I’ve developed few ways of creating loopable wallpapers from materials I can find over the net. Let’s see what you can do to make your favourite thing visible on your N900 homescreen.
Method 1 – Similar images with similar background
First of all you can obviously mix few wallpapers to act as 4 parts of one big, loopable image. To do this you need to look for wallpapers with the same (or at least similar) background on left and right edge. If background is similar, you can put images together on big (3200×480 pixels) image and cut to smaller images. Example here shows 4 images from Bleach anime series, as you can see background on side edges is always black (I find it the easiest to use black). It’s just the matter of placing images on every 4 of homescreens (order is up to you).
Method 2 – Placing small items on prepared background
You can see my second example, 4 screens, each with different item, but you can also use family pictures (more than one per screen), symbols, place them on any loopable background (or single colour background) and upload to your N900. For me it was just the matter of placing 4 images from Fallout game series.
Method 3 – Long items
There is possibility to cut long item into 4 parts and make it appear as it is one on your wallpapers. You can use picture of your favourite snake, mage’s staff from fantasy series, favourite knight’s sword like Excalibur, long-barelled rifle or anything long enough to fit 4 desktops of N900. Because I like eastern culture I’ve taken katana sword and as you see background in both ends is the same colour so even switching between last and first part is quite smooth.
If you have any questions, suggestions, need for detailed tutorial to do something similar, feel free to ask, I’ll try to cover all of the questions.

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Trademarks mentioned in this article (Bleach and Fallout) are properties of their respective owners.
For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 …

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As some of you may remember I wrote once that customization and personalization of my N900 is a kind of neverending story and I admit I still work on it to achieve perfection some day. On my quest I’ve found some things you may try and maybe some of them will become part of your favourite set.
This time let’s have a look on homescreen, or to be more accurate on wallpaper. If you have a feeling your wallpaper is static and boring you can try Live Wallpaper. After you install it your first homescreen will change to living picture of city with moving busses, changing sun position depending on time, just watch demo video. To be honest I haven’t found any additional configuration for this eye candy, so it doesn’t make good piece of software for me, but it’s only my opinion. Try it, you may be happy with that.
The second thing I can propose today is ProfilesX Extended Profiles Manager. It will install additional section in settings screen and will allow you to add new ringtones profiles and change between default two and additionally created profiles using statusbar menu (opened by tapping on clock/battery level area). This will allow you to add new profiles with completely new settings, so you can adjust it for every situation – silent profile for meetings, calm ringtone for day off, loud when you’re travelling or shopping and whatever you can think of.
This doesn’t make the end of ‘your way’ series. I’m sure there will be more and more ways to customize N900 and I will probably try most of them and maybe you’ll find something interesting here.
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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today I saw a video presentation of a new Samsung Phone in the Phonereport Blog and  I have to say that I was really impressed. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something similar for our phone too? Unfortunately there is no such function for the N900, but you can “pimp” your phone with some 3D generated backgrounds. Maybe you have the ability to create 3D pictures yourself with some programs or you can download a few examples from the N900 wallpapers site.
Here is a very nice one, which I found on this site:

It doesn’t come close to the Samsung effect, but it is a nice three dimensional rendering, which gives you at least a little bit of a visual perspective. To install this background, please follow the instructions in one of my previous posts How to make A Wallpaper by yourself, or just download the pictures and set them one by one as background pics on your phone.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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If you follow the blog and all of the posts, you probably noticed that Sam mentioned some good themes and wallpapers few times. I like most of this stuff, really good looking, well balanced and readable, but I like having N900 really personal device, so I will say my piece.
First of all I pay attention to something I like to call ‘consistency’. This covers my view on balanced color space, similar graphical solutions for every part of interface, overall smoothness of theme or wallpaper. If theme uses different palette on every screen I just can’t stand it, it’s not my way. I also cannot bare some color sets, like bright orange background with lime elements on it, it just hurts my eyes .
On the other hand I like going back to times when most screens were monochromatic, with green backlight and visible scanlines. In addition I’m big fan of Fallout games, where this type of display was widely used in interface. Since I have no time for making full theme I decided to choose one of available and make good wallpaper for it.
At first I’ve tried to find theme that suites my scenario, this step is pretty hard because it’s trial-and-error process. First choice was Melody theme (see Sam’s article), after some time I’ve found Matrix theme, which was a bit more fitting, lime and black theme. In the mean time I’ve found pipboy theme (Fallout fans should know what is it about) but it wasn’t very good choice, orange background and green and grey UI elements doesn’t fit my needs, I like App manager icons though.
Second thing is background, simple, minimalistic and mine, see the screenshots. I’ve putted some simple pictures, converted to monochromatic and added scanlines. And poof – my theme/wallpaper set is ready! Maybe you have some ideas of personalization combinations? Share it on Nokia N900 Forum.
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Fallout is registered trademark of Bethesda Softworks.
For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial

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In these following reviews, I will write about wallpapers specially made for the Nokia N900. Sometimes I will also post my own custom made backgrounds, and today I will start with one, which I made sometimes ago for my phone. I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to edit a snapshot of my virtual bookshelf and cropped it to 4 pics with 800 pixels width and 480 pixels height. You can download the pics and use them if you like to.
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks on the phone:

I named this one woodshelfs.
For installing the wallpapers as a looping background, please follow the instructions from my post N900 Backgrounds – How To Make A Wallpaper By Yourself. The other way to put wallpapers into a loopable background is to change the background picture on every single desktop screen. It will have the same effect, but it is much more work.
So here you are:

- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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I´m sure that a lot of you readers already pre-ordered your Nokia N900 and you are anxiously and desperately waiting for that moment to come. So, meanwhile I propose you how about starting customizing your next phone?
Where to start? The desktop wallpaper! Because in most of the phones we know it´s very easy to get one, but don’t you forget that on the Nokia N900 you have 4 desktop and the wallpaper has to loop to look like it never ends (360° Image).
On a few simple steps you would be able to create one by yourselves. Basically you will need to look up for Equirectangular photos (more info please click here), then you need to adjust the size to a 3200×480 pixels, cut it into 4 different pictures. Once you’ve done that, you need to create a file and write a text which is shown on the video.
The final step would be to send it to your Nokia N900 and enjoy it, but if you don’t have it yet, you would need to wait to see how the wallpaper that you created looks on your shining and stunning new phone.