S60 Open to new features

Great find, 10X 4 the heads up ;)

Teo

By the way:

My N90 theme under heavy development ;)))

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1885

Sorry to disagree (once again), but the "fact that you can create 100% customized look & feel for your S60" catched my eye.

To appreciate the statement, you need to know what is not included in that 100%. For example, you can't select font faces, font sizes, reposition or resize elements on the screen, edit menus (to create a less computer-ish *feel*)... in fact, you're pretty much left with choosing colors and graphics for icons and backgrounds. In preset sizes, mind you.

Either I am missing something, or this "well known fact" is a pretty big overstatement. More like total customization of 20% of the UI...

Niko, it depends how you define look&feel. It is true that you cannot change the interaction style and layout. But you can change the graphics of each graphical element. I consider that as a "look and feel".

I was thinking, wouldn't it be great of someone started a collaborative project about theme designs. For example, gathering different icon designs, clock designs, focus designs and so on to create building blocks of basic themes. This way, it would be fairly easy to create your own theme by just selecting and changing colours.

Niko: I'm glad that you disargree, makes world better place;) Well you got point, I agree - there are limitations what you can and what you can't do. For example fonts would be nice to be able to change but then there would be another kind of issues like choosing "wrong" font would make reading impossible in certaing languages. From my point of view Theme creation is implemented well in S60, it could be much less than it's now. Yes, "100%" is overstatement but "20%" is also underrating.

If you could reposition elements, it would't be Theme any more, you should do interaction design as well and that would make S60 visually quite hasty not to speak of usability - I mean I think S60 took sort of risk by giving possibility to change visual elements so heavily as UI style is also part of the brand. And it was good move. You really can't compare S60 Themes to e.g. skinning of winamp or similar because there is so much more to take into account in S60. Also, navigational issues are much more important in small devices than in big mature operating systems like win/mac etc.

It's interesting to see how Flash will change all this because it's possible to modify elements you mentioned. There are couple of examples of this in other devices.

JUHA: your idea about collaborative project is cool! For example creating lot's of different kind of icon sets is something that would help many Theme creators a lot. Maybe symbian-freak.com (Teo?) could start working on something like that? TEO: nice example.

Juha: As a (former) designer, my definition of look definitely includes layout and everything you can do with fonts. As an on&off web/flash UI designer, my definition of feel includes interaction style among other things like responsivity, etc. None of these can be changed with Themes, hence my "20%" statement.

Risto: I agree 20% is an understatement. ;) It's also good to know how you view Themes; for an "outsider" it's not obvious how you make a distinction between visual elements that are part of the interaction design and elements that are decoration. It's a good and important distinction.

And I'm eagerly waiting to see what I can build with Flash Lite. Now only if Nokia would allow replacing the basic apps (phonebook, calendar, messages) with Flash apps, that would get interesting.. ;)

my themes:

http://forum2.mobile-review.com/showthread.php?t=42209

Great dark theme! Particularly I liked the constructive conversation around your Theme. That's the way to do it;)

Hi Risto,

where is the my comment, I have to wait for approval or what!?

10x in advance..

Teo

Alexandre, great theme! Gives some "edge" to the phone.

Hi Teo, actually no comment is waiting for the approval. I've had couple of time similar problem, site says that comment needs to be approved but then there is nothing to approve. I'll try to find out what's happening...

Thx 4 the fast respond, I really appreciate, if I remember right I saw something about approving or something like that, but I'm not sure either.. ..

Anyway if it is lost in space I still have it on my PC and I can simply
repost it...

Here I am, sorry for delayed answer but my spare time is on the zero or even under, too many tasks everyday.

About Flash themes, I have try it and I'm not impressed, not at all, in fact I have to say it sucks at the moment, battery meter or signal meters doesn't work at all and IMPO its just a fancy screensaver, nothing especially.

Lets go back to the topic.

There are few really annoying issues; the first one is a very well known fact about changing icon pack trough theme menu.

As you may already know well, Nokia 6600 was the first S60 device with theme support. It has the function/feature allowing you to choose a different icon/theme set than the one which is installed as standard.

That means you can install for example some 3rd party theme like Crystallized. Then within this theme you can change the icon set if you prefer it rather than the default icons supplied with the installed theme. You may also combine any of the installed themes with any available icon set.

Unfortunately all of the phones that came after the 6600, such as 7610, 6630, 6680, etc do not offer this possibility.

I can't figure out why Nokia decided to exclude this function from all of the phones after the 6600, all I can say is that Nokia has taken a huge step backwards in terms of theme possibilities.

Anyway I found a solution for this strange Nokia's restriction but it doesn't work on latest S60 phones (2nd edition, fp2 onwards) I guess coze the different theme management. Sorry guys but I have to say shame of you Nokia, it's the essential feature!? Why it is abandoned, give me just a one good reason?!

The second thing is about font changing, strong point Risto but I tend to disagree with you, wrong font would make reading impossible but it's the same thing with themes isn't it !? I mean there are bunch of themes that looks sick as you said, with some of them it's almost impossible to use phone, but it isn't reason to disallow theme creating!? However its nice to know that there is a solution for font changing and there are numerous ready made fonts, but it's the shame that we have to take such a nasty trick to make our phones cooler and better, from my point of view it has to be possible trough Theme Studio.

There is the point that I quite agree with you, customizing phone trough themes is very well implemented in S60 phones, especially with latest and updated TS version, which allows changing almost every aspect of our phones and get almost 100% customized looks.

Also I have to mentioned Profimail (and other products from Lonely Cat games kitchen) IMPO its the best application ever wrote for s60 platform, authors completely ignored the Nokia user interface, and brings new dimension in boring s60 world, nice and small anti-aliased fonts, popup windows, progress bars and animations, just wonderful.

I'm in theme creating since first models of Nokia 6600, I've created few themes even before Theme Studio, completely manually indeed, just with assistance of MBM wizard, oh my god, I become little sentimental, that's were the times ;)

Now its quite easier, we have Theme Studio, latest version is the really nice with lot of improvements, it brings support for vector graphic (great improvement I admit, well done Nokia) but it is still da** slow, it has huge hardware requirements, and after all it requires very good graphic skills.

I'm quite sure it cause strange effect at users without experience, slow interface, vector graphic, raster graphic, layers, transparency, masking, all those stuffs sounds pretty terrifying for average PC user isn't it!?

Oh yes, idea about sharing icons sets with whole community is very nice idea indeed, in fact we have already something similar on SF forum / modding section. But from another hand I doubt in success of such an idea, mainly because designers jealousy keep they work protected and price it as real treasure. After all some of them sell themes, make money from it and therefore it isn't expectable that they'll be ready to share it with everybody.

That's all for know, apologies for my English, I know it isn't as good as it should be, I'm not the greater speller on the world, my vocabulary is poor, grammar is terrible and you have to hear my pronunciation :D but I just can't find enough spare time to improve it nowadays ;)

Kind regards,

Teo

Try No 5

Again, I can't belive it :(

I'll send you screenshot on the mail.. ..

Teo

Ok, now it works;) I'll send you an email why this did happen.

I also think that it would be great to have sets of icons (because they are very laborous to create) that you could just import to you theme while making it. There actually are thses kinds of sets availiable on discussion forums like mobile9.com.

I think that the biggest problem with the icon sets is that is is not possible (tell me pls if it is) to download a whole set of icons to your theme, but you have to click through each icon and change it to a new one...

So my message to Nokia TS developers is: Add a feature with what you can save the icons you have made ("Save icons") and a feature with what you can open an icon set ("Import icons"). This way you could share the icons you have made (if you wish) and use icons that other people have shared.

In fact you are right, its the main problem when we talk about icons set, current TS version lacks option for importing or exporting (in my opinion we have to have both options) icon stet.

As you said it can be done bout you have to click and edit every single icon and change it to a downloaded one and honestly it’s the quite tedious process.

In fact it’s even better to go straight to the skins directory and replace existing icons with downloaded one.

Oh yes, I almost forget, there is an option in Theme Studio to exclude some elements, for example if you haven’t nice icon set and you are to lazy to create it you can simply exclude icons from the theme during compiling and force phone to use default one.

Hi all,

I'll come back with my replies soon but just a note: there were some issues with junk filter so that's the reason for small mess about posting entries. Apologies goes to Niko, Jukka, Teo and Apocalypso. Thanks for your patience.

Even it took some time to get back to this topic, this is so interesting thread that I want to make my reply. Teo - what a great post! Thanks for your view. It's hard not to agree with you in most issues. Sure, technology is not ready yet but I know it's getting there. It's huge amount of work and compromises and swet to create fully (or partially) customizable UI and S60 Themes are just doing that. Problem is that it hasn't yet made itself to the public such for example Winamp skins. I think that challenge comes from all these compromises. I'm sure there are lot's of excellent reasons behind most of compromises (from business side as well as technically) but it has it's costs. Compromise is alway compormise.

Now another reason is, as you said, that customizing is still pretty hard, even it's easier now than ever. Really, you can't do any real personalization to your _own_ UI straight from the phone! Changing wallpaper isn't something I would call UI presonalization. Now what would be best place for some Ui customization than your own handset, while your'e traveling or listening boring lessons (if there are any;) I would love to see Theme editor, sort of "personal edition", in S60 devices where you could easily change for example colors, icons (from various pre-installed sets - someone could even buy these), fonts (I know I know...) and so on. Sure there are tons of reasons not to allow this but on the other hand, personalization is "the" thing nowadays so why not to give it a try?

Teo, you're absolutely right, even some Themes might make me sick, we still need them. Let all the flowers bloom. I just wish there would be more of them - lot's of more - with more professional, pixel-perfect quality. And some attitude. After bunch of Winamp skinners will find S60 Themes (or some talented Mac Theme creators), current theme-culture will have more depth and some shiny day someone will create site where you can share, develop, download AND buy some cool S60 Themes. I know there are couple good ones but I'm sure they all would love to have more activity (please correct me if I'm wrong). One of my favorite theme site is from the bright Mac side, Macthemes, man, did I hear someone saying something about benchmark?

Thanks Teo! ;)