Stop staring at a flashlight every night!

Tired of adjusting your display's brightness at night and day? Since daytime and nigh time constantly changes a simple timer based solution is sure to always be insufficient - especially if you travel. DimBot smoothly adjusts your display's brightness based on sunrise and sunset, to your configured brightness settings. DimBot tells you sunrise/sunset and makes it easy to adjust display brightness and settings.

Say goodbye to night blindness and dim mornings! The display will be smoothly adjusted over a configurable period of time even as you use your device.

DimBot is a non-free application.

The latest release has new features available to users.

• Notifications can now be disabled
• Bug fix which prevents notifications from frequently popping up.
• If omnipresence is enabled, a new Toggle Brightness feature is now available. By clicking on DimBot's notification you can easily toggle between your day and night brightness settings. Brightness is slowly adjusted to prevent temporary blindness.

Always ensure your phone's brightness is set properly. Check out DimBot - your eyes will thank you!

I finally have the beginnings of a website put together. I plan to have detailed product information available shortly. It does a good job of explaining what for you. If you use you phone at day and night, DimBot is truly a useful application. It is currently rated 3.8 stars with spam votes; five stars otherwise. Most user comments are excellent.

So you if you're curious, please feel free to check out the site at http://www.gearsoft.mobi.

DimBot has had a point release or two since I last updated this post. The updates are minor bug fixes and tweaks.

Tired of being blinded by your phone at night? Tired of an unreadable display during daytime? Tired of using timers which never adjust your display properly because of constantly changing sunrise and sunset times? Tired of endlessly changing timers in an effort to keep up with the ever changing length of daylight? Tired of location based applications which never seem to get your display quite right? Then DimBot is here for you!

DimBot, by GearSoft, is the first truly smart display brightness agent. It works for you, without blinding you at night! No other application properly dims or brightens your display for you, even as you use your Android device! Read more at GearSoft's website. No other application, free or paid, provides the features of DimBot!

A minor update to DimBot will be made available on Friday, May 1st, 2009. The price will also be dropped to $0.99! Don't miss out on the reduced price.

Next week I will begin looking at required compatibility changes to support Cupcake (Android 1.5). A series of minor releases which include feature enhancements and new features will follow shortly after. So rest assured, Cupcake support is coming.

The price of DimBot has now been reduced to $0.99!

DimBot has also received some minor bug fixes and tweaks. An about page as added and the license was slightly modified.

At request of users, larger transition times are now available for selection. Users can also select if the transition should start before, centered on, or after the sunrise/set event. A couple of bugs have been fixed. Slider brightness adjustment is now smoother and faster. DimBot is now localized for English, German, Dutch, Polish, French, and Russian.

Many new features are planned. New features coming next week.

Also, as far as I know, DimBot is the only display adjust application available for Android which only uses officially published APIs for display brightness adjustment. This means it is very unlikely you will experience breakage with future Android upgrades. Other applications are likely to break following future Android upgrades - just like what happened with all display applications during Android 1.1 to Android 1.5 ("Cupcake") upgrades.

DimBot truly is one of the smartest display management tools available for Android and continues to only get better. So go ahead, check it out. It's only $0.99.

You'll never want to use your phone again without it.

A new version of DimBot was just released. It now has a new dimmer dialog which can optionally be opened via notification. Of course the toggle brightness shortcut is still there.

Improvements include:

Caches last known location
Faster start up - thanks to location caching
New dimmer dialog (enable Dimmer in notification preferences)
*Faster & smarter location provider failover logic
Display Stay On preference is now enabled again and broken into two preferences; A/C and USB
Enable Screen Dimming preference is now enabled again
The main activity slider as well as the sliders in the dimmer dialog now show you the current setting on the slider - visible when you slide to the left

Notes:
(*) The failover logic is used when a location provider stops providing updates. For example, if it is using your GPS and you go inside, it will intelligently fail over to use your network location provider. Likewise, if your network location provider is unavailable (network down, APN disabled, Google down [happened this last Monday]), it will fail over to your GPS. It purposely have a network provider bias as it is a much lower power location source. And like all good applications, it queries the system to detect the best available providers. Meaning, if new providers are available in the future, DimBot can and will use them. The providers are not hard coded like most other location based applications seem to be.

The notification options, Toggle Brightness and Dimmer, are mutually exclusive. The UI does not accurately depict this fact but the states do properly toggle. If one is enabled and you enable the other, hit back, and then look at preferences again, you'll see the state of the other option has properly toggled. It seems the android framework does not support toggling as one would reasonable expect so it will require a re-write of the application widget to make this work properly. In the mean time, I apologize for any confusion this may cause.

A significant new release of DimBot is now available. It features a drastically improved Spanish translation plus many usability improvements. The GearSoft Website has complete details on the changes.

This release of DimBot (1.8.0) fixes a toggle brightness shortcut bug which would sometimes fail to completely brighten the display. I'm not sure how often it was actually observed in the wild as the issue was never reported.

Three new features have been added to DimBot. DimBot now allows for custom "sunset" and "sunrise" times to be applied by users. A new shortcut has also been added which brings up the DimBot Dimmer. This means notifications are no longer the only way to get access to the DimBot Dimmer.

The third new feature is the addition of animation. By default animation is enabled. Animation can be disabled for both the main GUI and the DimBot dimmer in preferences. A preference for each now exists.

DimBot also received some minor tweaks. The toggle shortcut now provides toast feedback. As an optimization, dimming and brightening speed has also been tweaked to operate slightly faster.

So there you have it, new ways to make your brightness always right!

GearSoft Homepage
DimBot QR

Say goodbye to clumsy timers! DimBot slowly adjusts your brightness based on sunrise/sunset and your physical location. DimBot automatically adjusts for locations and daylight savings. DimBot also tells you sunrise/sunset and allows for custom sunrise/sunset times too.

Version 1.9 of DimBot is now released. This version adds a new feature called Virtual Dimmer. With this release you can adjust brightness with one hand and best of all, you do so by rotating your phone left and right. New preferences have been added to support Virtual Dimmer.

To see the virtual dimmer, create a DimBot Virtual Dimmer shortcut on your desktop. Click on the shortcut and follow the instructions. You get immediate visual and brightness feedback for your adjustments. To make selection more sensitive, check out the preferences.

Animation for the new feature can also be enabled in preferences.

So there you have it, new ways to make your brightness always right!

GearSoft Homepage
DimBot QR

GearSoft has a new website at the same 'ol address. With the facelift came a DimBot FAQ! That's right, DimBot now has a FAQ!

The next release of DimBot will provide a link to the FAQ page. In the meantime, you can access the FAQ here.