Theme maker 0.85 versio is out

I just finished theme maker 0.85 last thursday. It's now been tested out by Tom Morris, author for the Aqua theme. From his feedback, I can say that it's all out for the grabs for anyone wishing to make a theme for Nokia 770. You can get Toms aqua theme from his homepage.

The latest version is special in the sense that the uninstaller works now flawlessly and removes all the icons and graphics the installer created. The most important feature on it though is that the scrollbars in opera are now themed close to perfection and they appear just the same way as they are in the other applications.

You can download theme maker from here: ThemeMaker085.zip

And here to demonstrate the scrollbars: Brushed theme (12 px fonts)



Screenshot is from brushed theme.

About 770 pdf reader

I was just yesterday reading The Tux magazine on my 770 on the couch. They use a wide screen format with two to three columns. Lots of images, a brilliant magazine indeed. Works really fast on the it 2006 too. While I was reading it though, I had problems reading it comfortably. If I used the fit to width -option, which I love, the font was too small to be read at a relaxed distance. Fortunately 770 has excellent zoom options. I zoomed in once or two times, depending on the page and reading was a bliss. ... Until I had to change page. In fit to width mode, you can just press arrow right to go to the next page. Unfortunately that means that I have to zoom out two times to fit width mode, press next page button and then zoom in two times before I can read the next page. That's 5 presses to get to the next page. Unfortunately that's often not even enough. The right button press registers much too easily two presses when I press it just once, after which I have to try to go back one page with the left button. Left button naturally behaves just like the right one. The same applies to the image viewer.



Well, to get things more comfortable, I noticed that I can switch to normal mode from the fullscreen mode and use the icons at the bottom of the page to go to the next page and then I'd switch back to fullscreen mode. Only 2 button presses and one screen tap to go to the next page. Quite an improvement, but still, there is no reason why it needs to take more than one press.

Zoom level 2

Zoom level 3

Enter navigation middle button. At the moment it is used to switch to fullscreen and back. But what's the need when 770 has a dedicated button to just to do that. So, it figures that a change is needed. How about using the navigation middle button to go to the next page (or show the next image in image viewer)? It would be a simple solution and the current button behaviour would not be missed.

Activites

Phew! After having dental surgery last monday, I'm finally beginning to look like a human again. Almost feel like one as well.

While suffering from horrible aches, I've been busy implementing some changes to media converter and theme maker. One of the biggest things is that I've been able to create projects for them in maemo garage. All files are now in svn excluding two jar files for theme maker for which I had some surprising problems in uploading them using netbeans 5.5. Oh well, I may just end up putting them in the svn some other way. Those libraries are not mine anyway, so I'm not sure if they belong in svn anyway. Before anyone comes asking, they were for a free (as in do whatever you want with them) license.

I just updated my 770 to 2006 os beta a few days after release. Splendid stuff. Many many improvements. Especially I like the integration on virtual memory, which is completely smooth. Also, EABI kicks as overall, as pdfs, flash and pretty much everything is much faster. Splendid stuff, as I said.

So, off I went to improve theme maker for the 2006 OS. A few tests and I got the installer stuff working. Then some heavy work on trying to figure out hot the theme actually works and now I can say that theme maker is inches off being complete. It's definately complete enough to make themes in already. What I'm especially proud is that theme maker is able to make .deb installer package for the theme now. What's so cool about it is that I was able to make the debian in java code and thus you don't need linux tools to be able to make packages.

Also, NuvoTheme is now in splendid shape, and it's naturally included in theme maker. You can download NuvoTheme from here (uninstall previous version first if you have such) and theme maker from here.

Also, I've been busy looking at media converter. Still working on multiple platforms really well. All the code is handled in subverion and I also tested tasking myself through garage. Wroks really well. Kudos for nokia for setting up garage! The latest media converter hasn't been changed much. Some small cosmetical issues, such as tuning presets and adding a notification that you can also dragndrop files to media converter. But inside there is one small and really nice improvement. For some reason it 2006 was not able to open videos that were made on mencoder and didn't have explicit -ofps parameter to set frame speed. Now, in the new version, this parameter is set on always and thus you can play back videos on ti 2006 as well.

I tested 352x288 resolution in it 2005 previously, but the video was a bit too choppy for my taste. In it 2006 this has changed completely. 352x288 resolution is the resolution proper for 770. It's smooth and looks absolutely gorgeous. Have a look at this small clip I made to experience what I'm talking about : ff7clip.

Theme Maker 0.5

I've been not too keen on doing updates to the theme maker in the absence of 2006 edition. However, tigert got me convinced about a week ago to add the installer components to the theme maker now. This way I can concentrate to just to add the changes that need to be done for the theme to work.

I managed to do the installer completely in java (nice), so that theme maker is still completely cross platoform and especially, also works in windows.

I also decided that since launch of 2006 edition is in Juna and that is a span of 30 days,
I figured that it might also mean the end of june, although I highly doubt it.

So, I decided to make another release now.
This version has been done to support 2006 edition and builds a debian package that works on 2006. So, if you are a Nokia developer, you can build themes that install nicely with the app installer, but for the rest of us, installer is not so easy. Fortunately, the debian does work in 2005 edition quite well. By following the steps described below, you should have no trouble installing themes on your 2005 edition as long as you have root access. Notice that 2006 edition will not require root access anymore.

Once you make a theme with the 0.5 version, you will get a themename.deb file in your installation folder.

Copy that to your 770.

open xterm.
sudo gainroot
cd /media/mmc1
dpkg -x themename.deb /

This will install the theme to your 770. Next, just go and change you theme to the new one.

Nice thing about the deb is that it is relatively compact size.

I'm off to New York tomorrow for a week or so and will be back on the 8th of June, so don't be surprised if I'm not returning emails for a while.

Oh, theme maker link: ThemeMaker.zip
And test theme debian: NuvoTheme.deb

NuvoTheme and MediaConverter

I just released a new version of MediaConverter. 0.95. Cool. Almost ready as a app I ould recommend. The new version added support for dragndrop. A feature that at least I have been looking forward to for a long time. In the end, adding the support for windows and linux was pretty easy. Like 2-3 hours of coding and debugging. But OSX is still a mystery to me. It apparently behaves a little different than linux and XP. Please someone with interest to debug it on OSX with me, contact me!

I also updated the NuvoTheme a bit by toning down the colors a bit. Someone suggested that I should start gzipping the theme files. A Nice idea. I'll definatly look into it soon. As that would allow also theme to consist of two files. A sh script and the gzip archive. Well, until 2006 os that is.

Here you can see the theme selection icon (finally).


And here is the media player, which looks very sleek in my opinion.


Also, the calculator really likes having simple and clean buttons instead of the default buttons that overtried to look cool.