[Guide]How to create a Maemo5 theme
 

Hi,

I am completely new to themes, never done it on any device before. So, what I am about to ask may seem to be really stupid!!!!

Where do I start?????


I have read through many post on here, and they all seem to be about Theme Maker, to which i downloaded. The app itself seems to be pretty straight forward, the bit I don't understand is what to do with the psd/png files.

I am familiar with Photoshop, and looking in the nuvo-fremantle-template.psd, I can see what looks to be a layout with a number of layers, do I just literally put my desired choice over the top of a section in this file, what happens when I don't change an area.....it is really these image files that I don't understand.

What happens if I add new icons in the icon file, will they ever show up, how do you reference them.

So I guess what I am after, is an example of how one of these template files are changed.

I'm sorry that this is really a very noob question

Re: How to start a new theme
 

im guessing you just put ur png files where the original was, with the same file name (overwrite it). then just test it out, the ones that you dont change will be kept at the original files.

I havent created any themes but ive taken parts from 5 or 6 different themes to make it a perfect theme for me. I dont use theme maker, I just manually edit the files

Re: How to start a new theme
 

that's an interesting thought, doing it manually.

Where are the theme files stored?

Re: How to start a new theme
 

usr/share/themes

the alpha is the default theme, beta is the 2nd. The rest just go by the name. The images folder is where most of the files will be, the background folder also has some interesting files. You must have root access to modify these files, and ALWAYS make a backup first

Re: How to start a new theme
 

If you want to have other people use your theme manual wont work. You have two choices first Theme Maker find it on garage.maemo.org but I want to warn you its very buggy and really doesn't work also only works right on mac and linux. If you want to do themes on windows or the non buggy way Go here http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2010...for-theme.html follow these instructions can't be easier if you run into any problems let me know here or at andrewfblack@gmail.com

Re: How to start a new theme
 

That is really helpful, thanks a lot, I'm going to have a play with it this weekend

Re: How to start a new theme
 

Re: How to start a new theme
 

Hi there! I'm not sure who have made that hildon-template, but there's something wrong with it. I just got message from extras testing group that none of my themes are gonna hit the extras-repo since they are not completely optified.

I checked and it's true: some random files are left under /usr instead of /opt. Same issue seems to bother your Marina -theme and Andrew's Maemo.org -theme also.

I hope that someone could locate why maemo-optify leaves randomly some files un-optified so that I could continue working with themes. I'm not sure if I have the willpower to re-pack all my previous themes, but I'd really like to publish my new IivilRoyal -serie soon since it's almost ready to roll.

Re: How to start a new theme
 

Don't know who told you that but several of our themes are in extras. Infact if you optify all the files then themes wont work. I know because I have optified an entire theme and it doesn't work. Files it leaves are very small anyways.

Re: How to start a new theme
 

I know they won't work if you symlink the whole theme-folder, but all the imagefiles and subfolders can and should be symlinked to /opt.

Yes, several themes are in extras allthough they take more rootfs than is suggested (more than 250kb). No-one just noticed it before in testing team before I launched over ten themes and someone had them all installed > lots of rootfs used.

Edit: just to make clear what I mean: the optification leaves random amount of image files ignored without any reasonable reason. For example your maemo-org theme takes about 438kb of rootfs because of these leftovers.
And what's more weird: files left without optification has no logic. it depends and varies if you make some changes into template.png and and pack it up again to .deb.