[Patch Request] Touchstone Lock Screen (Will donate $ for this!)

[Caitlyn McKenzie]

My brother and I have been rather annoyed with a change in the 1.3.1 WebOS update. As of 1.3.1, the Pre, when placed on the Touchstone, will go into the locked screen automatically. Before 1.3.1, this would happen only if you pressed the power button, allowing the screen to stay perpetually on and unlocked while it was on the touchstone. Very handy for using Pandora and such in the car.

Him and I really want to see this changed back in the form of a patch. Without this, car mounting is rendered useless (as dealing with a locked screen while driving is NOT safe, cannot be done blind easily), along with making the touchstone rather useless in my opinion as a desktop device when at work.

We'd like this enough that we're willing to donate some real money to whoever writes this one up. Depending on the difficulty and the time spent, of course.

If anyone thinks they can pull this off, that would be great, let me know! Thanks!

[Achill3s]

This will probably be done soon enough now that it's been reported. I had not noticed it. If Jason Robitaille gets bored, he might make one to do this (that guy is an unreal developer, top notch!)

[pattavino]

+1

I thought that was strange they removed that. 2 days before the update I got a second touchstone for work and now I should have saved the money and just plugged it into the wall.

Need this option back PLEASE

[jbg7474]

I agree completely!!! I'm really annoyed with this, it's bothered me all day. I keep my Touchstone at work and really enjoyed having the screen on. Why would they change something like that?

Anyway, I was beginning to think maybe I was the only one. I've been making noise about this in the Pre forum all day, and no one else seems to be interested.

I'll donate a little for a patch!!

[Caitlyn McKenzie]

Glad to see we're not the only ones interested in fixing this! If I knew how to make the patch diffs and where to start looking, I could probably figure it out myself. But I'd rather someone who knows what they're doing handle it!

[Faerie]

Yes, please!!! I would LOVE a fix for this!

[gpfountz]

Nodoze - and enable screenAlwaysOn. It is not a patch, but it works now.

[jbg7474]

Originally Posted by gpfountz

Nodoze - and enable screenAlwaysOn. It is not a patch, but it works now.

I thought about that, but then you'd have to turn it off manually when pulling the Pre of the TS. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[Faerie]

Originally Posted by gpfountz

Nodoze - and enable screenAlwaysOn. It is not a patch, but it works now.

Do you have to close the app to get the screen to turn off or will hitting the power button do it?

[Caitlyn McKenzie]

Originally Posted by jbg7474

I thought about that, but then you'd have to turn it off manually when pulling the Pre of the TS. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Yeah, that application isn't really ideal. I shouldn't have to run an app to keep it going, and to stop it when I'm done. That just adds onto the list of things I have to remember to do when I get in the car.

[ChemEngr]

there's a patch that adds more standby times and a 'never' setting. You can leave it at this setting but just remember to hit the power button to turn the screen off when you want.

[ChemEngr]

Originally Posted by Faerie

Do you have to close the app to get the screen to turn off or will hitting the power button do it?

Hitting the power button will turn off the screen. Nodoze is meant to keep the wifi active and an option to keep the screen on. However, the screen will turn off if you press the power button.

[Caitlyn McKenzie]

Originally Posted by ChemEngr

there's a patch that adds more standby times and a 'never' setting. You can leave it at this setting but just remember to hit the power button to turn the screen off when you want.

Still not ideal. I'd prefer if it only did this on the charger/touchstone. Having a standby time is useful since leaving the screen on otherwise drains the battery quickly.

[ChemEngr]

well they probably took this feature off because it wasn't working reliably for some maybe due to low quality or reliability of the ambient light sensor. Who knows. It may be very difficult to code a patch since Palm may not have released the API for the sensor. Just saying that this might be your only workaround. If it is important to keep your screen on sometimes, then this is your solution for now until a patch or OS update changes it back.

[jbg7474]

Originally Posted by ChemEngr

well they probably took this feature off because it wasn't working reliably for some maybe due to low quality or reliability of the ambient light sensor. Who knows. It may be very difficult to code a patch since Palm may not have released the API for the sensor. Just saying that this might be your only workaround. If it is important to keep your screen on sometimes, then this is your solution for now until a patch or OS update changes it back.

Yep, it appears that they changed the functionality on purpose. See here: Re: [Bug] Pre screen in "night" mode when on Touchstone during daylight in 1.3.1 - webOS Hardware - Palm Support Community.

But since it used to do it, seems like someone could do a diff on the pertinent files and figure out how to patch back in the old behavior. I can't claim to have the ability to do this (wish I did, though). But I know there are people around who do have the ability. Just got to get one of them interested!

[phillipah]

YES!!!! please bring this back i hate the new way. it use to be determined on how much ambient light there was...

[sakasune]

I'm not a patch writer or anything, but I've applied a few of the patches by hand back in the 1.1 days before Preware and have played around with various Linux distros.

I dug around a bit today and couldn't find anything relating to the screen when the device is mounted on the Touchstone (or the "puck" as it's referred to in the code). The only reference to charging I could find was the "bar-assistant" but it looked like it was about displaying the proper battery icon (/usr/lib/luna/system/luna-systemui/app/controllers/bar-assistant.js)
EDIT: looking at this again and thinking maybe this IS where the code I talk about below should go (around line 1615 there is a reference to payload.name == "puck" - maybe set another if statement just for being on the puck)

I'm afraid that what we might be looking for is in /usr/sbin/powerd which is a compiled linux binary I would assume. The only other thing I can think of, and I'm not sure what JS file it would go in, is when the device recognizes it is on the puck to set the screen timeout to a very large number (essentially being "never" - the same way the extra screen timeout patch does it). The only difference then would be that at night it would still be on, unless we can read the ambient light sensor (haven't looked at the SDK so I don't know) or just say something like "if later than time x and earlier than time y don't set the screen timeout"

Maybe someone with more familiarity can use this as a jumping off point. I'll look around more for the code where it recognizes the touchstone on Monday.

[jbg7474]

Just a bit of extra info on this: I've discovered after living with the change that it's not so incredibly bad. First, you can re-activate the screen very easily: push the front button (either open or closed), hit any key on the keyboard, hit the power button, drag the unlock circle. So when I want to look at something, it's pretty easy. Plus, even with the screen locked you can still hit the buttons on the music notification to control your tunes, and when driving, Sprint Navigation keeps the screen on by default, or you can use NoDoze or the extra lock times patch to keep the screen on if you're not navigating.

Info on the Palm support forum (linked above) indicates that this behavior we liked was actually a bug that has now been fixed. So it's almost certainly not coming back.

If we get a patch, great, but if not, it's not as bad as I thought it was initially.

[sakasune]

Originally Posted by jbg7474

Just a bit of extra info on this: I've discovered after living with the change that it's not so incredibly bad. First, you can re-activate the screen very easily: push the front button (either open or closed), hit any key on the keyboard, hit the power button, drag the unlock circle. So when I want to look at something, it's pretty easy. Plus, even with the screen locked you can still hit the buttons on the music notification to control your tunes, and when driving, Sprint Navigation keeps the screen on by default, or you can use NoDoze or the extra lock times patch to keep the screen on if you're not navigating.

Info on the Palm support forum (linked above) indicates that this behavior we liked was actually a bug that has now been fixed. So it's almost certainly not coming back.

If we get a patch, great, but if not, it's not as bad as I thought it was initially.

Yeah, I saw that about pressing the center button on the 1.3.1 Issues thread. It's all about convenience for me (and sometimes aesthetics). I find the music notification control a little hard to hit while driving, and using NoDoze or a higher lock time requires me to remember to set those before driving and after getting out of the car.
I'm going to try my idea for the patch on my phone this afternoon as long as I don't get bothered with "real" work There isn't a way to tell the emulator to be on the Touchstone, is there?

[sakasune]

I tried out my solution, it seems to work. I made my modifications to the bar-assistant.js file (it is in /usr/lib/luna/system/luna-systemui/app/controllers/). I will provide here what I did - but if you make changes to your phone, it is at your own risk and you should definitely backup the original file. Maybe someone can help me make this a real patch.

I will use the line numbers from the original, un-touched file, but if you have any patches that change the top bar (battery icon/percentage, date in the top, etc) then your line numbers may be different.

By the way, I haven't added anything to have it auto-lock if its too dark like it did in 1.2.1, so just keep that in mind.

Add these two lines at line 20 after this.wifiRadio = false:

this.previousTimeout = 60;
this.onPuck = false;

Go to line 1550, add a new line before the curly brace ("}") before this.chargingBannerShown = true and add this:

//if we are on the touchstone, set the timeout to "never" (actually 24 hours)
if(payload.name == "puck") {
	this.onPuck = true;
	//backup original timeout
	this.controller.serviceRequest('palm://com.palm.display/control', {
		method: 'getProperty', 
		onSuccess: function(response) {
			this.previousTimeout = response.timeout;
		},
		parameters:{properties:['timeout']}
	});
	//set new time
	this.controller.serviceRequest('palm://com.palm.display/control', {
		method: 'setProperty', 
		parameters:{timeout:86400}	
	});
}

And then at line 1558 after Mojo.Controller.getAppController().removeBanner('chargingAlert');:

//if we were on the touchstone, set back to original value
if(this.onPuck == true) {
	//set new time
	this.controller.serviceRequest('palm://com.palm.display/control', {
		method: 'setProperty', 
		parameters:{timeout:parseInt(this.previousTimeout)}	
	});
	this.onPuck = false;

If you have any questions, post here - I'll be visiting family for a few days but will try to get on here if I see anything