As yet unnamed theme for iriver H10 20GB and iAudio X5 (Now "Glassy Blue")

[karashata]

I'm back!

Apparently my old iriver H10 20GB wasn't as dead as I thought, a replacement ribbon cable between the device and the hard drive and it's back in business, though the battery seems to be in worse shape after being unused for so long...

Anyway, I'm trying to get back into theme/skin design for the iriver H10 20GB (and iAudio X5, though I don't make remote skins for my themes).

I've got one here I whipped up over the course of a good few hours or so, but I can't seem to come up with a name for it, so I thought I'd let you guys see it and possibly give it a suitable name, and maybe critique it as well.

I've attached some screenshots of the theme in action, showing the base skin (at the root menu), the WPS with and without cover art displayed, and the radio screen.

Let me know what you guys think!

[[Saint]]

Is that theme using userfont, or is it hardcoded?

The reason I ask is that the font is obviously lacking in glyph coverage.

Allowing userfont means that the user can fix this issue themselves (if they understand the cause of the issue, which they may indeed not), but it also allows the user to absolutely murder the formatting of the theme which may or may not rely on a font of a specific height. It is currently impossible to make a theme that will allow a user to specify the font height and adapt to it gracefully.

The solution to this is hardcoding a font with wider glyph coverage, then the user should never be presented with an issue such as that displayed in the second screenshot.
s
Locale support in themes, for example glyph coverage and language direction, often seem to get overlooked but it is quite trivial to compensate for this and supply the user with a situation where the theme will "Just Work" no matter what their native language may be.

Nice work, by the way. I just saw the font issue and this got me wondering if you were aware of it and how to combat it.


[Saint]

[karashata]

The theme does use userfont, but it sets the 12-Adobe-Helvetica font by default. The theme won't work well with any taller fonts, though, since the layout is determined by the line height. It would be up to the user to set a different font with better glyph coverage if they need it, hopefully the lack of glyphs wouldn't make navigating to an appropriate font too difficult.

I suppose I should have taken a screenshot with a different album as a preview so that wouldn't have been a concern, but I wasn't really thinking about that and was only concerned about showing off the overall layout of things.

Language direction must be a more recent addition to Rockbox theme design, I don't recall it being a feature that was supported the last time I created themes. I might have to look into how it works and see if I can't add it to my themes in a logical manner. Once I get it working in one theme, reusing the code in other themes is trivial, theme creation is a snap when you can reuse bits and pieces from previous themes and tweak them as necessary for the new one.

Thanks for your opinion [Saint], I'm glad you like it, even despite the missing glyphs with the font I chose to use.

A couple things I should note about this theme:

I forgot to mention in my first post that the volume level replaces the clock at the top of the screen while it's being changed. I did localize it after finding that "Volume" is a string that can be localized, I just hope the viewport for it is wide enough for all the possible languages. It's wide enough to fit everything with the Finnish language set, and it had the longest word for "volume" of the bunch I tested.

The other thing is, I didn't include any track time indicators in the WPS, and I realized after using it a bit on my device that it might be a good thing to have when trying to rewind or fast-forward a track to a certain point in time, since the progress bar is only a rough indicator of the position in the track. I'm not really sure where I could fit it in though without changing the current layout a bit by shrinking the album art and moving the track title up a line to make room for another line on which to put it.

I'm open to any suggestions anyone might have as to how to go about adding that in, ideally without affecting the overall look I'm going for. I'm also still taking name suggestions if anyone has any. I still can't think of anything even after using it for a while on my device.

[karashata]

Just a quick post to say, I've determined how to fit the current and total track times into the WPS without breaking the overall look and feel of the theme, and gave the theme a name, "Glassy Blue".

The theme is now available on the Rockbox themes site for anyone who wants to use it.

[ceres]

Somewhat related ... how did you replace your ribbon cable on the iRiver?

On the MB side, it is soldered in. I can't see what it is attached to. What kind of connector or terminal is the ribbon cable on the iRiver MB side, and is the cable easy to repace?

[karashata]

I just cut the ribbon cable off at the two points where it was soldered (they just keep the cable anchored to the board), after that you can just unlock the ZIF socket the ribbon cable is plugged into and pull it out.

You'll need to replace it with one that has a 0.22mm pitch on one end and a 0.35mm pitch on the other (usually denoted by a white plastic film on the thinner end and a blue film on the thicker end).