S60Tips.com

What is panorama picture? According to Wikipedia:

Panoramic photography is a format of photography that aims to create images with exceptionally wide fields of view, but has also come to refer to any photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio.

Normally, professional photographers create a panorama picture using a special camera, called rotating panoramic camera. Nowadays, we are able to create software. It is also called photos stitching. The idea is to “stitch” or combine several pictures taken from a standard camera using a special interpolation algorithm.

The picture below shows an example of panorama picture. The pictures were taken from Nokia N95 and stitched using Canon Photo Stitch. It’s not perfect yet since I’m an expert yet.

What do you need to create panorama picture? The first thing is, of course, several sequencing pictures. After that, you need software to “stitch” your pictures. There are several available applications that will do the job, e.g.:

• ArcSoft Panorama Maker ($39.99). This software is very easy to use; unfortunately it doesn’t come for free. There is a 14-day trial version.
• hugin (open source). It is an open source project for panorama application. The hugin community has created nice tutorials as well.
• Canon Photo Stitch. This is the one that I used to create the picture above. Unfortunately, the software is only bundled with Canon digital camera.
• … many other applications.

Tip: For best result, a picture must have at least 25% overlap with its neighbors.

Now you can create, share and scan bar code on your S60 devices. Today, Nokia announced a new service, called Mobile Codes, that allow us to create 2D bar code online. What is bar code? According to Wikipedia:

A barcode (also bar code) is a machine-readable (uses dark ink on white substrate to create high and low reflectance which is converted to 1’s and 0’s) representation of information in a visual format on a surface.

There are basically three types of bar code, i.e. linear, stacked and 2D (matrix). The left picture below shows an example of linear bar code. It encodes “S60Tips.com”. The right picture shows an example of 2D bar code. It encodes http://www.s60tips.com”.

You can create 2D bar code from Nokia’s new service, Mobile Codes. Note that it is currently in beta version. That’s why the URL still points to an IP address. There are also many other web sites that are able to generate bar codes, either linear or 2D. You can just Google them.

How about bar code reader? There are several applications that can scan bar code, i.e.:

• Nokia Barcode Reader
• Kaywa Reader
• Glass Reader
• UpCode Reader
• Semacode Reader

My favorite one is Kaywa Reader (see screenshot below).

Compatible devices: S60 3rd Edition, Nokia Nseries, Nokia Eseries.

Nokia has just released Nokia Video Manager, a PC application that allows u to transfer videos from PC to our phone. Currently it supports a limited number of devices only, as indicated in the web site, i.e. Nokia 6110 Navigator, Nokia 6290, Nokia 5700 XpressMusic phones.

Unfortunately, I don’t have those devices; so I couldn’t try this application. I have tried to convert some video files to my Nokia N73 and E61. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The converted videos cannot be played; RealPlayer only plays the audio only. Anyone has luck converting videos to Nokia Nseries or Eseries?

If you have the same problem as me, I have another suggestion to convert and play videos on our S60 phones, i.e. using SUPER application? Here are some of my old postings that discusses SUPER.

• Converting Your Videos to RealPlayer. It shows how to convert your video to be played on RealPlayer.
• Converting Your Movies to DivX Player for S60. It shows how to convert your videos to be played on DivX Player for Mobile.

Bonus Links

• Some Shortcuts in RealPlayer for S60
• Featured Freeware - DivX Player for S60

Compatible devices: S60 2nd, 3rd Edition, Nokia Nseries, Nokia Eseries.