Theme 1
Theme 2
Introduction
If you want to know how I programmed this theme in MFC, C#, and VB.NET,
sorry, I didn't! I had a slow Friday afternoon waiting for some results to come
thorough, so I clicked away for a few minutes and came up with this theme for my
Sony
Ericsson T610 [^] cell phone.
Nish and Chris though it would be good if I wrote an article on how I created
this theme, so...
How Did I Do It?
I used Theme Creator Pro
3G [^]
by Slavko Solar. Theme Creator is a fully WISYWYG theme editor, that amongst
other things, allows you to choose a colour for just about any item on the phone
you are likely to see. I simply added three custom colours to the standard
CColorDialog within Theme Creator, namely Orange (0xFF9900), Peach
(0xFFCC99), and Cream (0xFBEDBB), and then stormed ahead setting the colours
accordingly.
What is good about some Sony Ericsson phones is that you can place JPG or GIF
images on the tile bar, menu highlight bar, and background of most windows.
Using Adobe
PhotoShop[^] 7 I created the images I wanted...
- For the background I simply grabbed the picture of Bob
from
the homepage, and shrank him down a bit.
- For the menu highlight bar, I created a blank image with the relevant
background colour, drew a single pixel border around the edge, and pasted a
shrunk down Bob on
the end.
- For the title bars, I created a blank image with the relevant background
colour, created a new layer, and set the layer's Blending Options to
Bevel and Emboss.
- The 'Soft Keys' at the bottom of each screen were created in a similar way
to the title bars. I created a blank image with a white background, and using
the circular selection tool unselected the middle portion of the image. From
this selection, I then created a new layer, filled it orange, and set the
layer's Blending Options to Bevel and Emboss.
Once created, it was simply a matter of using Theme Creator to assign the
images to their relevant windows.
Screen Saver
When a key hasn't been pressed for 25 seconds, an animated GIF or JPG 'screen
saver' can be displayed on these phones. To complete the CodeProject look for my
T610, I nicked the largest CodeProject wallpaper[^] and cropped it. Screen savers for some reason, do not form
part of themes, so the screen saver images needs downloading to your phone, and
then selecting as your screen saver.
Public Apology
I would like to publicly apologize to Bob for
repeatedly shrinking him down whilst creating this theme. I assure everyone that
no aliens were harmed to make this theme.
Future
With a little work, this theme can be converted over to the Sony Ericsson
T630, T628, T600, and T608. If someone asks nicely, I may possibly do the
conversion.
Updates
After Chris' trusty Ericsson T39 finally died he too upgraded to
the T610 and immediately installed Jeremy's theme. Too many late nights and not
enough sleep called for a slightly darker theme. Thus was born the second
variant of the theme. Jeremy then tweaked it a little, Chris tweaked it a
little, and after way too much time wasted we came up with Theme #2.
