Rockbox Technical Forums

Support and General Use => Theming and Appearance Customization => Topic started by: jmsunlinenet on February 21, 2007, 09:28:30 PM

Title: Straightforward themes
Post by: jmsunlinenet on February 21, 2007, 09:28:30 PM
I have been using Rockbox for a few weeks and to say that I am delighted with it is understatement. However the 'worst' feature is that the default WPS is not what one wants, so installing an alternative is pretty much a necessity.

I am very impressed by all the work that has gone into many themes posted here, but as an, ahem, older person I find that there are very few themes that are straightforward, clean, functional, and easy to read. When you are driving in your car, or in poor light, you really don't want to be dealing with fussy background pictures or text colors and fonts that are hard to read.

As I have very limited computer skills, writing a WPS is quite beyond me, but I found that if you are a Gigabeat owner and find a theme that has the basic ingredients that you want, it is not particularly hard to edit the backgrounds and graphics to get something more to your liking, even if you don't write any code at all.

Is there any chance that someone could develop a system that would contain basically the same information and ingredients as far as the coding goes--after all, the number of things you can include on the screen are relatively limited--but offer the possibility of choosing from various background colors, fonts, progress bars at the time of installation? A lot of work, obviously.

I attach, just for reference and to give some idea of what I am talking about,  my current WPS and menu, which is adapted from the Unicatcher WPS, with just a couple of tiny changes to the code, but looks quite different from the original. I'm not planning to publish it, so no remarks about the copyrighted dog listening to audio!

[attachment deleted by admin, too old]
Title: Re: Straightforward themes
Post by: madsic on February 24, 2007, 04:40:14 PM
Hi and welcome to the forums :)

I'm no developer, so I can't really say anything as to the likelihood of something along the lines of what you're suggesting. I wouldn't count on it though I agree with you that a lot of WPS design is made with anything but functionality in mind and that the default also should be changed. It won't wow anybody and it should be a lot simpler and easy-to-read for the non-techies (if any such are to be won over).

That said I wonder if you are aware that the font, font size and the background and foreground (text) colour can be changed independently of the WPS as can a lot of other display options through the menus? Go to General Settings > Display > Browse fonts for choosing a font, e.g. a larger one for easier reading, and General Settings > Display > LCD settings > Bacground colour / foreground colour for colour options. Also if you would like to go further into WPS making yourself, there's a "simple guide to  wps making" to be found here (http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SimpleGuideToWPSMaking).

Hope this helps.

Oh and I don't think you need to worry about Nipper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper). The Sonny Bono act notwithstanding I doubt that that copyright hasn't expired after 110 years :)