altemyr
Joined: Jan 21, 2002
Posts: > 500
From: Stockholm, Sweden
PM |
This is a brief description about how to convert your favourite theme from your old phone to your new. The quality of the result may vary, but the most problematic part is if your theme uses photographs, and the new phone has higher screen resolution than your old one, then the pictures become grained due to that they cannot be enlarged with the same picture quality.
Prerequisites
You need the following:
- SonyEricsosn's Themes creator. IT can be downloded from Sonyericsson's develper web
- A good image processing program. It chould be capable of resizing images, and be able to save them in gif, jpg or png format. It's good if it can handle transparency also. Examples of such programs are Adobe Photoshop, PaintSchop Pro, or The Gimp.
- WinRar or WinZip or any other program that handles tar files.
Procedure
- The first thing to do is to extract the images out of the .thm file. A .thm file is actually a UNIX tar file, so the UNIX command tar would be perfect. If you don't have a UNIX system (Linux, for example) you need a program that can handle this format. One way is to make a copy of the .thm file and rename it to .rar, then open it in WinRar. Extract all image files from the archive.
- Start SonyEricsson's Themes Creator, select the phone model you want to create a theme for.
- Select menu File/Open and select the theme file from the old phone. The themes creatoe will probably complain about different theme version and say that it will convert the theme. Accept the suggestion. The theme will be converted, but the images will not fit very well.
- Now comes the part that requires most of the work. Start with the leftmost tab in the themes creator and work towards the right end. For each image used by the theme, first open the image in the picture editing program. Then remove the image from the theme. The themes creaor will show the dimensions of the image. Use that information to resize the image, and then save the image. If the image was a photo, it would help i you have the original photo somewhere, and use that an make a resized copy that fits the dimensions. There is also a risk that the proprtions (WxH) of the old image and the new one are different. In that case, you will have to decide wether you make an unproportional resize, which may distort the image, or whether you should crop the image at one dimension.
- Some images, like the tab unselected and tab selected images often require extra attention, and may need some artist's work in the picture editing program before they fit in nicely in the new theme.
- Save and upload the theme to your phone for testing. You will probably have to get back to some of the previoous steps here to correct some images before you are satisfied with the result. If so, remember to remove ld versions from the phone. They will otherwise be named a bit awkward in the phone, like "my theme" becomes "my theme(1)", etc.
- upload the theme to Esato
|
Posted: 2006-10-16 01:00
