Clarity for WM5 Smartphones

A golden oldie, now in smartphone format :)



I didn't make a "plain" version this time so you'll need the listed plugins.

The skin can be found at my site: Juni's PocketPC Skins & Themes

Smartphone WM5 skinning

Thought I'd pass on some things I discovered when skinning WM5 devices. Apparently there is no way to exactly define the softkey and titlebar gradients in the homescreen xml file. It has a color entry called "COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT" which has some effect on how the softkeys and titlebar is colored - although not exactly. This had me very confused until I did some extensive searching online and found that Microsoft has decided that skinners shouldn't be allowed to set these colors to what they want. Instead WM5 examines your skin and decides on a basehue value which is put into the registry. I have yet to figure out how to be able to set this to what I want inside the xml file. Any suggestions are welcome :).

Now, you can change this registry value and it will instantly without a soft-reset set the title bar and softkey gradients colors. Some nice people have even made a tool for calculating what you want it to be. Here is the info: XDADevelopers wiki

Especially the downloadable file at the bottom has very useful info :).

If I was making a theme for a pocketpc I could easily change the tsk file to have the theme set this registry setting automatically, but with smartphones there is no way to do that since a homescreen skin is just one xml file and one background image (how can I have the xml file set a registry value? Is this possible?). Also, if you set this registry value and soft-reset your device the basehue value will change (again, calculated from the background image of your theme and the "COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT" value in the xml file). I would want to know exactly how this calculation is done.

Very confusing and not nice from Microsoft :(.

Router problem fixed

...with 10 seconds of pressing a pen into a reset hole, 15 minutes of configuring and 1 minute of testing :)

Router problems

We are having some problems getting on the net at home. We'll be getting a new box tomorrow which should fix it. So if you bought skins from my site you can expect them tomorrow saturday the earliest. :(

The mystery deepens...

Apparently WeatherPanel has been sneakily updated to 2.5 - but still no word from the developer. He must be around, who else could have done the update. Reports say that the new version is even smoother and faster.

Read about it at the WeatherPanel forums.

Site re-design and new smartphone section

I re-designed the site a little bit. It should now work properly on mobile devices.

Check it out here: Juni's PocketPC Skins & Themes

I also added a new section for WM5 QVGA Smartphone homescreens (since that is the kind of device I have). So far I only added one skin, but there will be more. You may suggest plugins for me to try out if you want them in the designs :).