newClix: preserving jClix' spirit

[hhannah]

Well it seems like the "jClix fever" is back! Since evilg brought the original theme pack back to life under the official build, other themes based on pijulius' jClix are appearing, there are modified versions from the originals that work just like they were originally designed also on custom builds (tdtooke's)... but very significantly, the discussion derived from a recent jClix thread (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=16228.0) made many aspects regarding theme's licensing clear, and also indirectly did set a question about how themes should be licensed, following Rockbox' philosophy. The discussion about intellectual property threw also an alarm on how a lot of work could be wasted, if it's based on material that is not properly licensed, or if the theme itself is not properly licensed.

I don't know if the great jClix themes can or will be preserved, but just in case, as a jClix fan, putting some of pijulius' work/concept, together with a recent work made for finding sources for free images (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=16507.0), and adding some work to all that myself, I made a new theme series called newClix [iPod 320x240]. All the images are taken from the sources posted by Chronon. The basic pijulius' concept is preserved, although modified and made again. I tried to choose the images in the same way, that is, so that they don't get disturbed by the theme's elements, and also trying that the images do not disturb displaying album art; each image utilizes only "few colours". I followed also the pijulius' jClix idea of offering many options based on the same concept to switch easily between them. The newClix themes are licensed CC BY-NC-SA so anybody can copy them, modify them, etc only following the license's simple guidelines.

I had fun making them, it can be a nice hobby    Eight themes conform the newClix series (see some examples below) I hope you like them and enjoy them.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WpsIpod5g#newClix_Series_Pack

[Chronon]

Nicely done.  I like the subtle usage of text color.

[soap]

Very nice.

[shotofadds]

Good work, I like those a lot!

<cat among pigeons>
...though I think those screenshots are crying out for anti-aliased fonts...
</cat>

[hhannah]

<cat among pigeons>
...though I think those screenshots are crying out for anti-aliased fonts...
</cat>

  That would REALLY be nice for some of them

[crzyboyster]

I noticed something. The progressbar in all of the different versions have a grey box thing around them. I think that it was supposed to be a reflection, but something might have gotten messed around in the psd.

Otherwise, these themes look amazing! Much better than the last jclix for SVN. I can only imagine how nice they would look with multifont 

[Llorean]

I'm sure if someone submitted an antialiased font patch that worked well, and didn't make the UI even more sluggish on targets where it's on edge, it'd be considered.

[karashata]

Would the current fonts actually be anti-aliased, though..?  I thought BDF fonts (which I believe are what Rockbox's fonts are converted from, primarily) were hard-edged by default anyway since they're not vectored fonts...

[crzyboyster]

Did my gray-box-around-progressbar mention go completely unnoticed? 

I might make a nano version of this... and I might wait for multifont to do this even more justice. 

[karashata]

Hmm...  I would have to guess that the anti-alias patch would have had to smooth the edges of the fonts entirely, unless the lines were perfectly horizontal or vertical.  I would also guess that it would require a bit of processing power to do that, which would likely show up as interface lag while the fonts were essentially being "rendered"...  I suppose the Gigabeat models wouldn't suffer too much since they have pretty powerful processors for DAPs (I mean, come on, they're as powerful as the old Pentium 2s, based on clock-speed...).

Just my musing...

crzyboyster:  I noticed it...  It looks to me like it's supposed to be a sort of "glow-like" effect around the progress bar that didn't quite make it...

[Llorean]

Well, antialiasing can be done in advance and simply use pre-rendered translucency. If fonts moved from 1bpp to 2bpp you could then use the two "gray" shades as levels of translucency and have some very basic antialiasing. If you increased the depth further you'd get more levels of translucency. Limited (all existing BDF fonts wouldn't be antialiased, but my best guess is that's more or less waht's being done in that Fonts link.

[hhannah]

@crzyboyster

Did my gray-box-around-progressbar mention go completely unnoticed? 

Not at all, I'll look into that and see if I can make it look better, thanks for your feedback

Edit: It's a small detail but you did catch it and I think you are right, the PB glow should really be adjusted for each background (which I didn't), I will correct it and upload the changes

@Llorean

Well, antialiasing can be done in advance and simply use pre-rendered translucency. If fonts moved from 1bpp to 2bpp you could then use the two "gray" shades as levels of translucency and have some very basic antialiasing. If you increased the depth further you'd get more levels of translucency. Limited (all existing BDF fonts wouldn't be antialiased, but my best guess is that's more or less waht's being done in that Fonts link.

Interesting, I'll give it a look too, thanks.

Lacking anti aliasing fonts makes even more difficult to use this kind of backgrounds under the menus, where the text could be anywhere; maybe for some cases it's a better idea to forget trying to show the original image there (at least while the antialiasing fonts work, or something like the customlist patch for use in menus gets incorporated), and use a solution like ZincAlloy's Slick theme

Edit: I uploaded a modified version that has some corrections on the progress bar's reflection; I also changed the backdrops that had more font antialiasing problems in the menus, so that they look something like the images below

[crzyboyster]

I think that theme packs such as yours can benefit from a feature such as this:

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4885

I wonder if it could be implemented...

[hhannah]

I think that theme packs such as yours can benefit from a feature such as this:

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4885

I wonder if it could be implemented...

Regarding this an other possible features, last week I read this about the Rockbox projects for the Google Summer of Code 2008 http://www.rockbox.org/mail/archive/rockbox-dev-archive-2008-04/0087.shtml , it will be very interesting to see the details of each project, in this case specially the WPS Theme Editor project:

WPS/Theme Editor
by Rostislav Chekan, mentored by Dominik Wenger
Backup mentor Nicolas Pennequin

[hhannah]

@Mr.Kit, I didn't use photoshop, I used GIMP. There is a psd file that might be useful for you posted by pijulius (who made the original jClix themes) here http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=16228.msg122602#msg122602 , if you still want to use my file, please just let me know.