Themes
Well I’ve had the phone for a couple of weeks, and whilst waiting for V12 firmware to bother appearing for UK phones, I’ve been playing about with themes.
I found a bug!
It appears that some of the colour settings don’t take effect until you turn the phone off and on. For example I had been using built in theme “Nseries 2″ since I got the phone. This is quite a dark theme. Today I thought as it was a nice day, I would switch to another built in theme “Nseries 1″ which is nice and sunny with a blue background.
Everything seems to switch fine. However, if you go to contacts and then want to start typing a name (in the rather strange on-screen, only shows letters which are possible from the contacts you have, keyboard)… Suddenly you find all the the little touch boxes, which have a light background, have the letters written in white… Ummm… I couldn’t see anything!
Turning the phone off and back on again makes the letters now appear in black, which is far better against the light background.
So it looks like the foreground text colour for this strange predictive keyboard only takes effect when the phone is turned on… tut tut.
Online themes
I was hoping to review a few themes, unfortunately I have a gripe. Many many many sites (including quite a few that should know better), group the 5800 and N97 together. Sure they have similar specs, and the same size screen, and they are both touch screen, but there are some big differences. The N97 has dedicated call/cancel and application buttons below the screen, it doesn’t have/need virtual touch ones like the 5800. Unfortunately many of the themes and wall papers either draw, or have some graphical effect to make the 5800’s virtual buttons look sexy. This just looks stupid on an N97.
I thought I might as well try to fix a couple of themes, I’ve already downloaded the Carbide developers app and N97 SDK, but as yet I can’t work out how to create/edit themes. I fear I need to download a different version of Carbide purely for themes. Wonderful!
I have looked at writing myself a simple app for the phone, but I am finding carbide totally inaccessible. I have been a software developer for more years than I care to think about. I’ve programmed in everything from 6502/Z80 machine code in the 80s (when I should have been doing my school homework), TSRs in DOS and more recently windows programming and some venturing into Linux.
So programming is not a problem. The carbide IDE (integrated developer environment) is! I’ve looked for online guides, unsuccessfully. If anyone can point me in the right direction, please do!
