What does Dark Keys do?

As those of you who own a T-Mobile G1 phone with white keys already know: the keyboard backlight of those phones is very annoying. In certain light conditions the keyboard backlight makes the keys much harder to read.

To solve this problem I created Dark Keys 1.0: a simple program that switched the keyboard backlight off. By attaching Dark Keys to a keyboard shortcut, you can switch off the keyboard backlight from any program with just a keypress.

After making Dark Keys 1.0 available through the Android Market I received a lot of feedback. Based on this feedback I created Dark Keys 2.0. I included the following new features:

Backlight toggle: The application now toggles the keyboard backlight on/of, instead of only turning it off.
Permanent: The application now tries to prevent the phone operating system from interfering. If possible, the backlight always stays on or off while the keyboard is open. This feature makes Dark Keys interesting for owners of a black T-Mobile G1 phone too, because it prevents the keyboard backlight from switching off after a few seconds.
Remember state: The application remembers the state of the keyboard backlight when the keyboard is closed. When you open the keyboard again, the application restored the keyboard backlight to the remembered state. This way you don't have to switch the light on or off every time you open the keyboard.

How to bind this to a keyboard shortcut?

Open the phone Settings screen
Go to: Applications
Go to: Quick Launch
Choose a key to assign to
Select Dark Keys from the application list

When you hold the Search key (the one between ALT and @) and press the key you have chosen in step 4 the keyboard backlight will be switched on or off.