Symbian 3rd Edition O/S is supposed to grant access to the dialog used to select media files, even to programs that are self-signed. However, in a few recent editions of the Symbian O/S a mistake was made that caused this function to write a system setting and thus required a Capability that was not available to self-signed applications. Nokia admitted this mistake in a Knowledge Base article, but now that the faulty editions are out there, nothing can be done to fix it unless all of those phones are upgraded to a fixed version of the O/S.

Note that if you own a phone that denies you access there are a couple of other ways to get around the problem than just using my alternate selector. If you have a hacked phone, just directly install the unsigned version, or you can us Symbian Signed Online to sign the unsigned copy of ContactsEx. See Installing and Running for full details.

Clearly I can't put out ContactsEx with no way to select an image for the Full Screen Picture ID feature on phones that deny access to the built-in dialog, and so I had to write an alternate selection dialog.

My dialog doesn't include thumbnails of the images (because my research has concluded that doing so will be a major undertaking that I don't wish to tackle at this time). However, I've added a few twists to my dialog that I hope will make up for the lack of thumbnails.

If you find that your phone presents you with an error message when you try to assign a picture (or in one case it was reported that the phone actually rebooted) you can change the selector from within the Settings dialog. Go to the Picture ID tab of Settings and scroll down to Picture Selector. The choices are Native Selector and Alternate Selector. Choose the latter. Note that even if you can use the native selector, you are free to use the alternate one if you find a compelling reason to do so.

My selection dialog displays files sorted in reverse chronological order by default, so that any recently-taken photographs will appear right at the top. However, you can quickly swap between sorting by date and sorting by name just by choosing a item from the Options menu in the dialog.

When the list is sorted by date, you can narrow the field by typing in numbers that represent 6-digit dates (in the YYMMDD format). As you type, the list of files will narrow. For example, as you initially type "09", only files modified in 2009 will appear on the list. As you continue and type "06", only files from June of 2009 will be shown. Finally, as you type "13", only files from June 13th, 2009 will appear. You can clear the last-entered digit with the "C" key, and you can return quickly to the full list by pressing the Reset softkey.

When the list is sorted by name, you can use the very same T9 search technique as you can with the contacts names. For non-QWERTY phones this means you spell the name of the file you want as though you were typing it in using T9 predictive text. For QWERTY phones, just type the name on your keypad directly.

Once you have chosen the picture you want, press the OK button.