Renamed from Lights Out to Sunset to avoid name collision with another product.
One of the things I find handy in Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile 6.x is the ability to assign a "lights out" function to any spare key on your phone, like the "down" button on the D-pad. This shuts off the LCD backlight saving power while listening to music, podcasts, etc.
Playing with Windows 8 and Windows 7 Tablet PCs I noticed there doesn't seem to be anything for doing this. At least not that I've uncovered. I was sort of expecting a gesture or something, but nope.
So I looked around for a small utility and found nothing but horrid things dependent on .Net Frameworks and bloated in size themselves. Life is too short and disk is usually SSD and not a cheap resource, so I did one better.
This program is a very simple VB6 program that compiles down to an 8K EXE. Run it and it shuts the monitor "off" saving power. Just drop it on your Desktop or place it somewhere else and pin it to the QuickLaunch Toolbar (or Taskbar if you haven't re-enabled QuickLaunch).
Start your music and tap on Sunset. Pretty much any gesture brings the LCD back "on."
Just unzip the attached archive and right-click, Make or open it in the IDE and Make it there. Deploy as you will, no dependencies aside from the preinstalled VB6 runtime libraries.
Should be testable on your desktop with no trouble. Wiggle the mouse to bring your monitor(s) back on.
Sunset Binary.zip is here. You may want to right-click, Properties... then Unblock to avoid a security prompt every run!
Last edited by dilettante; Oct 11th, 2011 at 01:46 PM.
Reason: added link to compiled binary, renamed program
Reply With Quote
