I crave a brightness button

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pmennen

Senior Member
Jun 28, 2012
72
4
I have found all kinds of widgets for controlling brightness, but they all have one disadvantage - you have to first go to the home screen and then click on the widget. I really want a way to control brightness from any application without having to leave the application to go back to the home screen. The CM9 based rom I'm using (Paranoid Android) actually has something like this ... but I don't like it for two reasons. The first is that it takes two taps to bring up the brightness slider. (One tap to open the notification window, and a second tape to bring up the toggle screen). The 2nd reason (and more significant) is that the slider is quite small and for me it does not feel very responsive or easy to control. The brightness slider control from some of the widgets I have tried are much easier to use.

Ideally I could bring up a brightness widget by long pressing on the physical home button. Currently this long press on my note will bring up the recently used apps, but this function is already served by a soft button provided by CM9. I've read that the ADWlauncherEX will allow you to reprogram the function of the long press - although installing and learning how to use a launcher seems like overkill, especially since I have a rom that already includes quite a sophisticated launcher.

I found an app that would bring up a brightness slider when you clicked on the vol up or down buttons. This worked well for brightness although was a major drag when all I wanted to do was adjust the volume. I also found an application that would allow you to call an app or a widget in response to a double or triple click of the volume buttons. That seemed ideal because it would give me quick access to a brightness control without interfering with the main use of the volume rocker. Unfortunately that application seems to have been discontinued (why!) and I couldn't even seem to find an old verison of that.

Another idea would be to reassign one of the soft keys provided by CM9. Since these soft keys merely duplicate the functions of the existing galaxy note keys (the physical home button and the two buttons on either side of it). Unfortunately I have yet to find an application that can remap one of those buttons. Another idea would be to add another soft button near the 3 soft buttons that are already there. (Are their any applications that can do that?)

And finally I figured that brightness could be controlled via screen gestures. I did find some applications that claimed to be able to do this, although I couldn't get them to work on my Note.

If you know of any application or method that can provide a brightness control button, please let me know as this is the only remaining aspect of the note's user interface that is still driving me nuts.

Thanks
~Paul
 

Cinthiar

Senior Member
Jul 15, 2011
240
24
Wasn't there a feature in CyanogenMod 7 that would allow to change brightness via sliding sideways in notification area? Too bad it never worked for me in any of the phones I tried CM7 in. :D I understood it should have worked with no slider? Just sliding your finger accross the notifications area? That would be better than a slider imo.
 
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Ekreed

Member
Apr 12, 2011
10
2
I've not used paranoid android, I'm using the RC of CM9 and that does have status bar brightness control. To turn it on you go to system, then Status bar and there is a tick box. Maybe that is still included in PA if it is CM9 based? It lets you control the brightness from anywhere just by swiping left and right on the status bar.

It is not as nice as the notification tray slider you can find in AOKP roms, and there used to be a mod for CM9 that did this, but it no longer works, but it is better than nothing.
 
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Cinthiar

Senior Member
Jul 15, 2011
240
24
I've not used paranoid android, I'm using the RC of CM9 and that does have status bar brightness control. To turn it on you go to system, then Status bar and there is a tick box. It lets you control the brightness from anywhere just by swiping left and right on the status bar.

It is not as nice as the notification tray slider you can find in AOKP roms, and there used to be a mod for CM9 that did this, but it no longer works, but it is better than nothing.

Exactly what I meant. :D
 

ohmlawx

Member
Aug 22, 2010
37
5
hi bro,

i m using switchpro widget. u can put the widget inside notification bar. and can set the brightness level.
 

pmennen

Senior Member
Jun 28, 2012
72
4

Thanks for the tip John. Qbright certainly has one of the best brightness slider bars I've seen and the configurable buttons are great. However I have to say I'm somewhat mystified about how you use it. Qbright says you can activate it by long pressing on the search button. Search button? Do we have such a thing? On either side of the physical home button I only have the menu and back buttons. By long pressing the menu button I do get the search menu ... but it doesn't bring up Qbright. There is also a "Google" button at the top of the launcher. Pressing on that also brings up the search menu, but again it can't bring up Qbright. I'm running Paranoid Android. Maybe that's the problem. Does the stock ICS have a search button?

Thanks
~Paul
 

pmennen

Senior Member
Jun 28, 2012
72
4
To edit the setting.
Open the QBright app and then press the hard menu button left of the home key.
John.

Hi Tinderbox. Thanks for your reply but I think you seriously misinterpreted my question. I mentioned that I like that the Qbright buttons are configurable so I obviously found the preferences menu. But I was asking how you bring up the Qbright widget (other than clicking on its icon from the home screen of course). The documentation suggests this can be done by "long pressing on the search button". (There is no preference item related to this). I couldn't bring up the Qbright widget by long pressing on anything, so I'm wondering how you do this. If you actually have to go back to the home screen to start the widget, that would greatly detract from the beauty of the widget (which I'm sure is why they put the search long press capability into Qbright). But as I indicated in my previous message, it seems that the galaxy note does not have a dedicated search button, so this feature may not work. There are so many ways one could start such a widget I'm somewhat amazed that no one has figured out how to do it. (Or maybe they have and I am just in the dark or very confused). One way would be to long press on the back button. As far as I know, this currently does nothing so there would be no drawback what so ever. Perhaps a long press on the volume up or down button could also work for such a thing. Or an extra item could be added to the menu that appears when you press the power button. Or since I have a CM9 derived rom, it gives me three more soft keys (back, home, and recent apps). A long press on any of those could be used to bring up the widget. Or even a regular press on the first two could be used since they are duplicates for buttons I already have elsewhere.

Is this a valid question, or am I out in left field somewhere?

~Paul
 

ChodTheWacko

Senior Member
Feb 8, 2011
1,521
468
I once accidentally set my brightness so low that I couldn't see the screen AT ALL.

I found myself really wishing there was some foolproof way to reset the screen to 100% brightness.
For example, rebooting the phone auto-resets the brightness to 100% or something.

I also tried using tasker so some obscure combination like volume+home could also reset the brightness.
I don't recall how I managed to reset my phone - i couldn't see anything. I think I just flailed about on it.


- Frank
 
A

AndroidSlave

Guest
Paul...i am lookingforthis too...qbright should have an option to change that... So you can ise the long oress menu button for us note users wjo dont havr a search butto

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apurvapatel

Senior Member
Mar 15, 2009
262
93
Gujarat
Try kimi's.15 toggles. Gives you 15toggles in the notification bar, brightness being one of them. Need to flash it via recovery though.
 
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AndroidSlave

Guest
Can i flash that in temprary cwn? I have a stock rom with the temp.cwm root.method

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pmennen

Senior Member
Jun 28, 2012
72
4

At first I thought that might be the answer, but I ran into two problems with it. The main one was that I would accidently change the brightness pretty often when I was just trying to click on an icon for instance. (Unless I made the slider very thin ... but then it was too hard to grab the slider). The other problem was that some of my full screen applications would force themselves on top and the slider would not activate.

Someone in another thread suggested what I now feel is the ultimate solution:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote:
Originally Posted by aalupatti View Post
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....home2shortcut
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh my gosh!!! You weren't kidding. Such an application does really exist

This solves all my problems with the galaxy note.
I can't believe this was so hard to find. I can't imagine that anyone would uninstall this application after trying it. It's like getting 3 extra hardware buttons for free!

I'm using:
- Home,Home to bring up Qbright.
- Home,Back to bring up papyrus (you never know when you need to scribble a note)
- Home,Menu to bring up a toggle widget (haven't decided which one yet, although I'm sure it will be easier to use than the built in PA one).

Thanks a million.
~Paul
 
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AndroidSlave

Guest
Paul what is this app called the link doesnt work

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LordManhattan

Senior Member
Oct 20, 2007
15,039
5,495
Kepler-34b
You can adjust the brightness on most Note ROMs by deactivating auto brightness and tap + hold on the statusbar and slide the finger.

Left = Decrease the brightness
Right = Increase the brightness

Sent from my GT-N7000 using xda premium
 

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