176x132x16 Deep Blue Nano theme

[MHael]

I've put together this mock up of a theme I'd like to make. Inspiration from the cabbiev2 theme, the prepod theme and the original apple theme. I'm also planning on using some code from the cabbie and prepod themes.


Labelled Normal
Labelled Volume change; no artwork

Is its similarity to the apple 'now playing' screen a problem? I've used (I think) the same font as apple does, Myriad, it comes with Photoshop. I made all the icons myself.

Is it possible to apply text formatting to the font with rockbox? The playlist count, artist title, album, play time, time remaining are all bold and 24 pt (14 pix).The clock is 20.5 pt Normal. The next queued track is 17 pt, bold.

Will the HDD indicator flash so much as to be annoying?

[BdN3504]

I think it's not OK to release a theme using myriad under the license required in the theme guidelines. you can use a font that is either released under the gpl, the license mentioned in the theme guidelines or simply one that already is contained in the rockbox fonts archive. You can also advise people to get the myriad font themselves, but releasing it with your theme poses a copyright violation AFAIK.

it's no major problem that your theme resembles another theme, as long as you've created all the graphics yourself.

if you want to have different fonts in your theme, you'd have to include a multifont patched build with that theme in the custom builds section of this forum (or somewhere else). The standard rockbox build, meaning unpatched current, daily and release, only supports two fonts: one defined by the user in the cfg file of the theme and the second is the system font (i don't recall what it's called, some of the devs will know, but i think it's a 10 point fixed font). on the other hand you can use the whole 16 bit rgb colour palette provided by your screen, so you might consider using that to your advance.

the hdd indicator activity depends on various settings, mainly the cache settings. there are several themes using the hdd indicator on my gigabeat and i haven't noticed it as being disturbing.

does the "volume progress bar" the volume levels?

PS: i don't like the shuffle icon, if i looked at the screen for the first time, i wouldn't understand it's representing shuffle. i'd use two crossed arrows, or some randomly ordered digits, or as in the fine amarok theme, a simple die.

[MHael]

Ok, I found a similar font released under the GPL. It doesn't look as good, but it's not bad.
Font: http://www.dafont.com/bitstream-vera-sans.font?psize=xs&text=Santana+g

   

I wasn't asking if I could use multiple fonts, I was asking if I could apply formatting to the text, like this. I won't need to bold the text anymore because of the new font, but can I change the font size? Or would I need to use that patch and have two copies of the font in different sizes or use the system font?

Yes, while adjusting the volume the progress bar stops being the progress bar for the song and becomes a graphic indicator for the volume, the same as happens in the prepod theme. That's the plan, anyway.

The shuffle icon was supposed to be a spoon, as in mixing. I suppose it's better to just stick with standards. I've mimiced the apple shuffle icon and gone with crossing arrows, though I still made it from scratch myself.

[BdN3504]

formatting text is only possible with the alignement tags, so bold or italic is not. fonts in rockbox cannot be changed in size once they are loaded, if you take a look at the font archive, you will notice the fonts in there are ordered by size.

would I need to use that patch and have two copies of the font in different sizes or use the system font?

if you want to have more than one user-specified font and the standard system font, then yes, you have to create your own build including the multifont patch.

the new shuffle icon is better. you could depict a mixer rather than a spoon. Maybe that's a symbol easier to understand.

[karashata]

Last I checked the multifont patch (here) needed a bit of work to function with the recent builds (and this was quite some time ago...) It appears nothing has changed since then (since the Flyspray task is closed that kinda makes sense...) Unless you're willing to do a little work to make the mulitfont patch work and compile your own build with it included, you probably shouldn't try to build your theme using multiple fonts (though you can use the built-in system font in your WPS along with whatever other font you choose.)

[MHael]

Ok, I narrowed it down to all fonts 12px Bitstream except for the clock, next track title and the 'up the boom' while changing volume, which will all be system font. Also made a mixer icon for shuffling. If no one can see anymore problems, or has anymore suggestions, I'll start making it work.

   

[karashata]

I have to admit this looks like a rather nice theme, very clean and to-the-point. I hope you don't have too much trouble making it work, and feel free to ask if you have any problems, I have plenty of experience making themes and would be glad to assist in any way I can.

[MHael]

It's Done! Thanks for all your help. It's clean because I decided what needed to go in before I even started drawing and didn't add anymore after that.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/8/29/194093/Deep_Blue.zip




The volume bar code is pretty ugly and it took me quite a while to get it working. It's even uglier than the prepod theme. So that I didn't go over the buffer I had to slice up the volume bar into 27 6x12 pieces (could've gone more but I didn't have many letters left and 6 goes neatly into 162), plus changing the last piece for a red one to indicate volume > 0dB makes 28. As the volume goes up, it displays piece a, then a and b, then a, b and c then a, b, c and d then... This works, but the line is 1600 characters long (I used a Perl script to generate it). Something similar to %pb would be great if I could find where to implement it and knew how.

Battery setup is a bit ugly too, to minimise buffer usage it's split into 10 images. To make it flash when power is low, the whole battery line is duplicated except for the one image. I also had to make a bit of a sacrifice on the next file info; it doesn't scroll, and so is left aligned to make room for numbers.

I think the biggest thing missing from the WPS code is a way to control order of operations, which for this too, I'd try and add if I could find how. I'll probably make this a full theme when I get a chance, so I won't upload it to the main themes page yet.

[macgeek417]

I like this theme. I wanted a e200 version of it. So I created one!

Deep Blue e200 Hack v2
Hacked the backdrop so that the bottom line is repeated the rest of the way down. To fill in a little bit of the empty space, I copy-and-pasted the code from RockSansa to display "AAC - 126K" or "MP3 - 212K" or whatever. Hacked the WPS so that it moved the album art to the bottom, and always show the track info centered using the width of the screen.

[MHael]

Glad you like it; here's a zip of the things I used to make it.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/8/29/194093/Deep%20blue%20creation%20files.zip

*PSD File
*Bitstream Vera Sans Font
*The custom shapes for PS
*And Fony and Rockbox font convertor

RFC alone made the font go funny for me, but using Fony to go to bdf and then bdf -> fnt program included with RFC gave a much neater result. I thought it'd be easier to just include them. Modify the theme to your heart's content.

Just so you know, the idea was to have a blue back light shine from the bottom of the screen, onto a black background. You might run into problems adding new things due to the size of the volume code, the wps is probably close to its limit on the number of tokens. Also, before you start adding things in, I suggest you write up/draw exactly what you want on the screen. You usually end up with a much better result that way.

[macgeek417]

Yeah... i ran in to quite a few problems modifying it. when at the bottom (below volume meter) I try to %al or %ar things, it just moves things a little bit, but not all the way to the left or right. 

Oh, and in that psd file, i didn't see a layer for that blue lighting.


EDIT: What I want to do is make the album art bigger and alligned to the left, and the file formay info allighed to the right. when I try alligning things to the left or right, however, they only move a few pixels to the left or right. It treats everything below the volume meter as if the screen is narrow.

EDIT: I created this backdrop that matches the wps nicely.

Sansa e200 (176x220)

Nano (Untested) (176x132)

[epithetless]

Are you dealing with a narrow viewport, macgeek417? If absolute left and absolute right are only a few pixels apart, I would look into adjusting the width of the viewport they're contained in. Viewport syntax is as follows:

%V|x|y|[width]|[height]|[font]|[fgcolor]|[bgcolor]|

[macgeek417]

The viewport is the problem.
I can't modify the narrow viewport. that would mess up the theme.

EDIT: It works!

Deep Blue E200 Hack v3

*inhales deeply*
Moved the codec info to be alligned at the right, next to the "x of y" info. Centered the album art at the bottom and made it 80x80 pixels, filling up the extra space at the bottom of the screen. Included the backdrop I made for the sansa e200, and added a theme file I made that matches the while playing screen nicely. The theme file sets the selection bar to a gradient of at the top a lighter blue to a darker blue at the bottom, and sets the backdrop to the included one.

[MHael]

The PSD was made with Photoshop 7. The blue glow is a layer with just a very light blue, almost white line with a blue outer glow layer style. It should be directly above the background layer and be called 'Background Lighting'.

Would you like me to do something like this for you?


I'm not sure what I'd do to fill in the space left by a lack of artwork. Perhaps a logo of some kind, or some extra information.

I've brightened up the play mode icons as I found them to be too dark the way they were, too.

[macgeek417]

Aah. if it was a PS7 layer, than maybe the gimp can't open it. I'l see if PS5 can.

Oh, and no. I modded the theme so it's pretty much just the way I want it!
Now if only my sansa still worked

I'l modify my modded theme so it looks better when I get a new sansa.