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Hey fellas.
I am sure it's been discussed before and my searches to find something fruitful have been met with limited success:
I am looking for a way (if possible) to skin my comm manager. I have the 6 Button lateral one from Custel's V1.1 and not the 8 or 10 button manager.
Any idea's?
You should find one in this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=316107
I'm using the HTC Kaiser Comm Manager Fixed.
I see the comm managers but I am trying to find a way to skin my current one. Is there a way to editthe skin on my device? Where are the skins for the comm manager kept at on the device?
All of the graphics for the Comm manager exist in windows\
If you find those files and edit/replace them, you can change the whole way comm manager works.
Problem is, every button is its own image and each has 3+ states (on, off, disabled, or other options). On the 10 button comm manager, that means there are 80+ files to edit.
Thanks Dishe.
Looks like I have a lot of cutting & pasting...
Update:
For anyone looking, on my Alltel PPC6800 I found the files to edit in the \windows dir. The backgrounds are the P_BG & L_BG (portrait & landscape). The status icons are labeled as Status_Off & Status_On.
xweaponx said:
Thanks Dishe.
Looks like I have a lot of cutting & pasting...
Update:
For anyone looking, on my Alltel PPC6800 I found the files to edit in the \windows dir. The backgrounds are the P_BG & L_BG (portrait & landscape). The status icons are labeled as Status_Off & Status_On.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What someone should do (I'd do it if I had the time!) is create a photoshop .psd file with all of these graphics assembled as slices. Then we can change the background color, etc. and export them as individual files without having to manually edit each one.
In the mean time, the long way is the only way...
Dishe said:
What someone should do (I'd do it if I had the time!) is create a photoshop .psd file with all of these graphics assembled as slices. Then we can change the background color, etc. and export them as individual files without having to manually edit each one.
In the mean time, the long way is the only way...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i just got done getting all the files on to my card... and now on my computer.. should i make a PSD or just zip it and then people can do w/e they would like?
i have all the PNG files in the windows dir.
I am trying to do what you are but I posted a thread about the access rights of the files for being able to replace them... are you not running into the same problem?
It wouldnt let me modify them at first but once I copied them to my computer, clicked on properties and removed the read-only, all was well. After amendment, they copied over the original on my device with no problems...
Oh wow I will give that a shot... thank you!
I am not sure how that would work though, seeing that the files on the device would still be read-only and shouldn't be allowed to copy over. When I changed the settings in TC it didn't save them either...
Nvm I figured it out! Thx
skanndelus said:
Oh wow I will give that a shot... thank you!
I am not sure how that would work though, seeing that the files on the device would still be read-only and shouldn't be allowed to copy over. When I changed the settings in TC it didn't save them either...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Honestly, I'm planning on replacing them on the ROM-level, and flashing a new custom rom with my new files.
dc13 said:
i just got done getting all the files on to my card... and now on my computer.. should i make a PSD or just zip it and then people can do w/e they would like?
i have all the PNG files in the windows dir.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
dc13, getting the files are not a big deal... I have a decomposed ROM image on my computer with all the files that go inside it, so I didn't even need to look on the PPC. I just viewed all files by thumbnail, and grabbed the 80+ files that looked like they belong to the comm manager. BTW, not every .png is for the CM. Some of them can be HTC Home, or the Dialer, etc...
I would have put them up if people were actually having a hard time getting them. The problem is changing them in a uniform fashion!
For example, if you're familiar with photoshop, and you want to change the gradient background to be, say, red and black instead of grey and black, you'll need to create a full sized gradient background that starts from the bottom of the screen and goes to the top (just like the current background image which starts at the bottom as a darker color and ends as a lighter gray on the top), and then make sure somehow that every icon has the appropriate part of the background appearing behind it in the png. This is very time-consuming to do to 80 files.
However, if you had the time and knowledge of Photoshop and ImageReady slices, you could create ONE .psd file that contained all the .pngs arranged in their proper places. Then, change the background of this larger picture, and do whatever you need to do with the icons (which would have to be arranged as layers), then you click to save it, you can have it automatically split it into all the slices needed as individual .png files.
Once this is set up, skinning the comm manager will take a matter of minutes. The problem is that this is probably 2-4 hours worth of work to set up, and I personally don't have the time to dedicate to it right now, especially since its not a paying gig.
I put together a quick guide to creating a Today, Slide2Unlock, Startup, Dialer and Commanager theme. It's in the Hacking & Modifying section of the forum...
xweaponx said:
I put together a quick guide to creating a Today, Slide2Unlock, Startup, Dialer and Commanager theme. It's in the Hacking & Modifying section of the forum...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I couldn't find your thread, could you provide a link?
thnx
Raudel
It's not that difficult to create a commanager skin, but it does take time to make it look good.
I currently have skinned my commager. I am using the commanager that poorlyduck uses in his theme package but mine has a new vista look.
[email protected]$ said:
It's not that difficult to create a commanager skin, but it does take time to make it look good.
I currently have skinned my commager. I am using the commanager that poorlyduck uses in his theme package but mine has a new vista look.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You wouldn't possibly want to share that skin would you, looks great and would go good with my wisbar theme.
I am sorry if this is a noobish question or there is an easy answer, but I was looking at customizing my phone a bit and I saw the part about making your own splash screens (which is awesome), but I was wondering how to make custom boot animations - what tools I would need, type of files, etc. I thought there would have been a thread somewhere in the Themes & Apps section but I could not find it, and doing Google search leads me to just people posting their own custom animations.
Is there a thread someone can direct me to that has this sort of information? Any help would be appreciated - thanks!
Bump - does anybody know? Also, the boot noise for the BAMF Sense 3.0 RC3 does not work, another reason why I want a new one, ha.
Have you opened one of the bootanimation.zips? What file types are in there?
Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk
A PNG image and a series of JPG images that make the animation, but I was wondering if there was a program that took an animation to make it into a series of JPGs, or if there were certain requirements/specifics in terms of how to make a boot animation.
+1 on this whole post, I attemted last night to make my first animation, and if it is just the tedious task of re-saving the same picture over and over again with just minor changes on each one to create the animation, than ok, so be it.
It just seems that with some of the very cool animations there are, for example the boot animation to the new BAMF 3.0 has moving clouds in the background, that seems like it would be pretty hard to do manually moving the clouds a little bit for each frame.
It would seem pretty obvious to anyone that extracted the bootanimation.zip how the animation works, just more speaking on the creation of each of those frames.
Would be nice if someone with experience with this chimed on and offered some help.
Thank's in advance.
Does seem pretty tedious manually moving and saving them as you said but I'm guessing that's what they do.
Probably wouldn't take that long if you had everything on layers in photoshop and you could just move layers themselves.
Alternatively, if you already have a video, I'm sure there's a way to convert that to a series of png's as well.
Ok I'm on the phone so giving a tutorial is out of the question. All you really need is patience and a goal.
First download Gimp for editing. Forget PhotoShop all together unless your rich.
Download the following scripts or plugins.
Background overlay
Save all layers
GAP (video editor for Gimp)
Google the hell out of what you want. Chances are someone allready has done what you want.
Read, read, read (time to not be lazy, what ever your doing you can find some direction at least with some good internet research)
Google "editing Android boot animations".
Create images (JPG or PNG) in the same aspect ratio of 480x800.
JPG images will be significantly smaller in file size
PNG images will have a much better quality
Sent from my thunderstick
Use GAP to convert an existing video to images frame for frame.
Very useful if you find a good video.
Sent from my thunderstick
I actually do have Photoshop, do you know how I can use that instead of Gimp/GAP? Also, I am sort of confused at how you take an existing video and turn it into something you can use as a boot animation... I found this link (http://www.machackpc.com/how-to-changecreate-your-boot-animation-for-droid/) but I am sort of confused by it and wish I could find someplace with simpler instructions.
I just use others. I used the Call of Android animation and the mw2 style on my incredible, and I just edited the files to use the same ones on my thunderbolt.
Message delivered via my BAMF Thunderbolt
Ok, did a little research last night and today and tried a bunch of different programs for converting animations to a series of .png files and finally settled on one. I tried some free one's some trials and this is probably the best one I found so far.
Xilisoft Ultimate video converter. I was able to load an .avi, (or many other supported formats.) Program made it very easy using the "clip" feature to select out a section of the video I wanted, then converted that "clip" to a series of .png files. I was able to easily select the length of times between the extracted images "less time will obviously give you a smoother animation but require more pictures", also I could manually input the size of the outputted files (to match our phone's resolution).
I have only played with it a little bit but so far seems to be pretty good.
Also I have one other program I have been playing with to help with this. Jasc animation studio, which works with paint shop pro, has a pretty cool feature, which lets you copy into the clipboard all of your extracted image .png's, then "paste" them into animation studio as a new animation, you can then watch them from there, or load any indivual frame into paint shop pro. You can also save the clips as an animated gif. Very easy to make changes to individual frames and see the result's without having to flash to your phone.
Hope this helps.
Wow! Awesome, thanks, this is perfect and in great detail - what about sound? If the video has sound, will I try hope it gets synced with the series of .png images? And what else would I need for the bootanimation.zip folder? Will I need a .txt like when I change the splash screens?
An Introductory Guide To Theming Miui
Much like CM7’s theme chooser, Miui has it’s own powerful theme engine. If you’ve ever wanted to create your own theme or have a theme that you like, but want to make some personalized changes; then this guide’s for you. This guide is intended as a supplement to Team D3rp’s thread; [Guide][Reference] An Intro to Themeing. Please keep all questions, comments, and suggestions in this thread Miui related also feel free to hit us up at #miuithemes on the IRC. General theme questions, image editing questions, xml editing questions, or anything of that nature should be asked in the afore mentioned thread. Before we begin it’s necessary to thank scott951 and bigrushdog for there past, present, and future work on this rom. In addition, thanks to toastcfh & Cayniarb for they’re work on the AOSP kernel, to bliind for his ongoing IRC support, tips & tricks, and lastly thank you to Team D3rp (il Duce, ranger61878, thoughtlesskyle, vanessaem, dkdude36, jdeloach, and pstevep), all the old HeroC guys, the many talented themers, and everyone else on XDA and IRC who continue to advance my knowledge of the Android Operating System.
To begin your adventure into the world of Miui theming you will need some tools, listed below:
7zip or similar archiving program
Notepad ++ or similar text editor
gimp or another image editor of your liking
Root Explorer (or your prefered file manager with root access)
Patience, patience, patience
Time, time, time
A willingness to bork your theme over and over again until you’re satisfied with how it looks
Recommended knowledge of adb and/or Android Commander- not required but may save you the time of having to restore a nand.
Table Of Contents: for your convenience in finding specific areas of help.
Lesson 1: File Structure
Lesson 2: Beginning Your Theme
Lesson 3: Lockscreens
Lesson 4: Changing Icons
Lesson 5: SystemUI
Lesson 1-File Structure
Before you can actually theme anything, you need to learn and understand the basic file structure used by Miui. Themes are compressed into zip files with a .mtz extension and are applied by the Miui theme engine at “run time”, meaning you can change almost any aspect of your theme on the fly, without a reboot. Download my intro.mtzfor use along with this guide. This is the default Miui theme with a simple lockscreen included that you will have to edit (It works but you will have to edit it per my instructions for it to look good), and a generic android boot animation / boot audio file. If you currently have a theme that you are generally happy with and would prefer to edit that more to your liking, you may do so by opening the Miui theme engine, select customize, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “Backup Theme” After the backup finishes running, navigate to /sdcard/Miui/theme/backup and move the “backup.mtz” to your computer. Now let’s extract our .mtz and have a look at what’s inside. Right click on the intro.mtz, select 7zip from the popup window, and then select extract. Now navigate to the extracted intro.mtz folder and have a look inside. You should see the following:
“boots” folder
“preview” folder
“ringtones” folder
“wallpaper” folder
“com.android.launcher” zip file
“description” xml file
“icons” zip file
“lockscreen” zip file
The folders can be opened as any normal non-compressed document folder, the zip files (although their extensions are nonconventional can be extracted with 7zip, and the xml file can be edited with notepad ++.
Lesson 2 – Beginning Your Theme
Decide what you want your theme to be called and create a new folder for it somewhere that’s easily accessible.
Open up the description xml with notepad ++ and edit it to reflect your theme name on this line: <title>Default</title> (Change default to the name of your theme), edit this line: <author>MIUI</author> (Change MIUI to your name), and edit this line: <version>1.0</version> (from 1.0 to whatever version # you would like to call your theme). Save your changes and move the document to your newly created theme folder.
Now, if you so desire, in your theme folder create a sub-folder entitled “boots”. Place any boot animation & boot audio files in there that you would like to use, and make sure they are named correctly (bootanimation.zip & bootaudio.mp3).
Create a “preview” sub-folder next. This is where you’ll put screenies of your theme as you continue to develop it. Make a note of the file names and sizes in our original preview folder, also if you look you’ll see that some of the photo’s are jpegs and some are pngs. I’m not sure as though it matters, but I’ve developed a habit of keeping the extensions the same.
Now you can create an optional “ringtones” subfolder and assign rintones, notifications, and alarm sounds, by default when applying your theme. Use any mp3 you like so long as the files are named alarm.mp3, notification.mp3, and ringtone.mp3.
Create a “wallpaper” sub-folder within your theme folder next. This will be the home of your theme’s default wallpapers. Again look back at the intro.mtz and notice the size of the wallpapers in that folder and the file names. When you put your jpegs in this folder make sure they are named exactly default_lock_wallpaper & default_wallpaper.
Congratulations, you’re now on your way to making your own custom theme. Now that we have the simplest things covered and out of the way, we can really start to dig in and do some theming!
Lesson 3 – Lockscreens
Skipping over icons for a moment, lets jump to the lockscreen. As you know by now our Evo 3D’s QHD displays don’t play nice with a lot of lockscreens. So lets have a look at what we can do to fix some lockscreens. Please keep in mind that depending on which lockscreen you want to use they will require varying degrees of changes to work properly. The lockscreen I included with the intro.mtz functions, but looks terrible so now we’re going to fix it.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Extract the “lockscreen” file that you downloaded. Inside you’ll see an advance folder.
Open the advance folder. This is where the lockscreen magic happens. In this folder are all of the lockscreen png’s and the manifest.xml
Let’s start with the png’s.
-Resize bg to 540X854
-Resize bottom to 540X178
-Resize bottom_batterylow to 540X178
-Resize bottom_batterylow_light to 540X240
-Resize charging_bg to 540X178
-Resize charging_bg_mask to 540X178
-Resize status_bar to 540X40
-Resize time_bg to 540X107
Feel free at this time to edit and/or replace any of the png’s in here, as you see fit, but be sure to keep the icon names correct and watch out for the .9png’s (there are none in this lockscreen, but if you’re using a different one beware).
Now that the png’s have been fixed let’s have a look at the manifest.xml, shall we? Our images are all the proper size, but if we loaded the lockscreen now the icons and text would all be shifted to the left of the screen. In addition to making positional adjustments in this file we can change font sizes, font colors, time & date format, even which apps the lockscreen will launch. Go ahead and open that xml file now with notepad ++.
Find the two lines that begin with <DateTime. On these lines you can change the x & y locations to get the proper spacing from the edge of the screen. (x is the horizontal plane, y is vertical x0,y0 being the top left corner of the screen). You can change the text color (#FFFFFFFF) to whatever you like, the font size (size="22"), and the date format (format="EEEE, MMM d")
Now, work your way down through the xml file making any adjustments you want to make to text sizes, colors, and the necessary x shifts to get your lock screen lined up and centered. If by chance you get stumped, compare your manifest.xml with my manifest_edited.xml.
*hint, I usually use a pencil and paper to draw out the screen, then calculate how big of a left margin I want, add the image widths, to figure how big of a change to make. For example x20 + 480 png width=500 (leaving a margin of 40 on the right). Now if I change to x30 + 480 png width = 510 (leaving me a margin of 30 on both sides).
Once you’re done editing the .xml save it (keeping the original of course to refer back to)
Back out of the advance folder now and right click on it. Select 7zip from your popup window and “add to archive”. When prompted, save as “lockscreen.File”, set your file type as .zip and save your lockscreen to your theme folder. After it saves delete the .File from the name. Windows will prompt you that this may make the file unusable, click ok.
Navigate to your theme folder and select all of the contents inside of it (boots, preview, etc…). After selecting all of your theme components, right click again, select 7zip, and add to archive. Save your theme as “whatever_name”.mtz again choosing .zip as the file type.
Place your newly created theme on your sd card in /sdcard/MIUI/theme
Apply your theme and enjoy. If you’re happy with your lockscreen take a screenie to add to your preview folder when you make your next edits. Remember if you do something that breaks your lockscreen you can unlock by pressing back & volume up, or you can use adb to delete lockscreen from /data/system/theme and push a good lockscreen back.
Lesson 4 – Changing Icons
Changing your desktop and folder icons is a great way to enhance your theme. Miui’s theme manager makes this a relatively simple process. You can edit the default system icons with your image editor, or take your favorite icon collection and resize them to 90 X 90 pixels if you wish to keep the default Miui icon size. Lets begin!
Navigate to your intro.mtz and use 7zip again to extract the icon.File
Inside your extracted icon folder you’ll find all of the icons for the default system apps.
Changing system app icons
Find the icon that you want to replace in the folder. Let’s use the browser for example.
Find the icon you want to replace it with and rename that icon to com.android.browser
Copy your new browser icon into the icon folder, overwriting the existing one.
Adding icons for user installed apps is a little more involved but worth the extra time to make your theme complete. Here is where it’s handy to have Root Explorer.
Let’s say we want to add an icon for dropbox
To do this we need to know the process name. There’s a couple of ways we can figure this out. Since every app installed creates a data folder we can use Root Explorer to look in /data/data for the package name of dropbox.
If the package name didn’t jump out at you, don’t worry there’s another way to do this. Again using Root Explorer navigate to /data/app and find the dropbox apk, long press on in and select “extract all”, navigate to /sdcard/extracted and open up the extracted dropbox apk. Now tap the AndroidManifext.xml file, which should open up a text document and the very first line should give you the manifest package name.
By now you should know that the package name for dropbox is com.dropbox.android
Find the dropbox icon you want to use.
Rename the icon to com.dropbox.android
Drop the icon into your icon folder.
Repeat these steps for all of the icons which you want to replace.
Once you are finished replacing and / or adding icons, from within the icon folder, select all, then right click, select 7zip, and add to archive.
When the 7zip popup screen appears, save them as icons.File
Delete the .File extension
Move your zipped icons file to your theme folder.
Zip your themes folder up as a .mtz and apply it to your phone the same as you did after you finished your lockscreen.
Again, if you are happy with your icons take a couple of screenshots for your preview folder.
One last side note in regards to icons. You may notice some apps such as google + install additional icons to your homescreen (G+ Messenger). I have not figured out the image naming trick yet for these icons to display from the theme, but I’m working on it. For the time being I extracted my G+ Messenger and replaced the icon in the /res/drawable-hdpi folder, but I am searching for the correct way of doing this and will update accordingly once it’s figured out.
Lesson 5 – SystemUI
Now, we're going to add a whole new element to our theme. We're going to create a SystemUI zip in our theme mtz. Examples of some things that we can change in SystemUI are notification bar icons (signal, battery, gps etc), Statusbar back ground, and the various tabs you see in your drop down expanded notification page. Let's begin.
Create a working folder somewhere easily accessible on your computer (I like to work from my desktop)
Inside of your working folder, create a subfolder named "res"
download my theme_values_SysUI.xml, place it in your working folder (not in the "res" subfolder), and rename it to theme_values.xml.
Now you will need a SystemUI.apk from Miui. You can either unzip the rom on your computer and move the .apk to a convenient location of your choosing, or you can use adb to pull the SystemUI.apk from your phone. It's located in /system/app.
Now that you have your SystemUI.apk, using 7zip, extract it.
Open up your extracted apk and navigate to the "res" folder. Copy the "drawable-hdpi" folder and the "raw" folder and move them to the working folder on your desktop, placing inside of the "res" subfolder you created earlier.
Begining with the "drawable-hdpi" folder, use your image editor to make any .png adjustments that you want incorporated into your theme, or replace the png files as you see fit. Be sure to maintain the nomenclature of the images if you opt to replace them. Beware of editing .9.png's as they cannot be edited in a conventional fashion. If you need help editing .9.png's there are several methods and guides around xda. Or ask in [Guide][Reference] An Intro to Themeing.
When you're finished with the drawable-hdpi folder move to the raw folder. This is where your battery icons are located, contrary to Sense and CM7 roms. You'll notice that there are not 200 little battery png's but 3 large png's with all of the images put together in a sort of battery collage. To assemble a battery collage, take your individual battery pngs and resize them to 38 X 38. For graphical and charge indicators, you will now need to create a new image sized at 152 X 190, copy and paste your individual png's into the large image so that you have 5 rows each with 4 png's. Follow the same procedure for making a % png, except that you'll be using 10 rows of 10 images, so your png size should be 380 X 380.
When you're done with all of your images, open up the theme_values.xml with notepad ++ and make any color edits that you see fit. Please note, that these color changes will have minimal impact on the look of your theme. Most of the color changes of your system will not happen here. These are default values for only a handfull of apps.
When you're finished editing the xml save it and close it.
Finally select your theme_values.xml and your "res" folder and right click your mouse, select 7zip, and add to archive. In the 7zip popup window name your file com.android.systemui (no additional extension here, make sure it does not say zip at the end....just: com.android.systemui)
After the folder is compressed and zipped, move it to your theme folder and zip your theme up as a .mtz as you have been doing right along. Apply theme to your phone and enjoy.
To Be Continued…..Next update will be for Framework-res or launcher depending on my upcoming amount of free time!!!
Additional Information: Tips, Tricks, & Links
Advanced Lockscreens - Tips and Tricks
Thanks il Duce for these links:
Lockscreen 2.0 Reference
General Miui Tips & Tricks
I wasn't born rich, I'm good lookin' instead!!
Great job Hockey!! Love how everything is coming together!
Added to the OP in the one stop shop also.
Edit: This is really thorough. Very nice indeed.....
Awesome work
Sent from my PG86100 using xda premium
Place holder for me
Is that all we do to the manifest because I really want that Evoluer slider to unlock my phone.
Temari x Shikamaru
scott951 said:
Place holder for me
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you sir, for providing us with a rom worthy of the time it takes to do all of this!......No disrespect intended to any of the other developers who's roms I also use, but I've fallen head over heels for Miui
knowledge561 said:
Is that all we do to the manifest because I really want that Evoluer slider to unlock my phone.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, there's a lot you can do with the manifest xml, but to make them work properly yeah....It's just resizing the png's and shifting the x & y values accordingly for our screen size. I'm downloading the lockscreen you're trying to use now.
Thanks for this.
hockeyfamily737 said:
Well, there's a lot you can do with the manifest xml, but to make them work properly yeah....It's just resizing the png's and shifting the x & y values accordingly for our screen size. I'm downloading the lockscreen you're trying to use now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
vanessaem said:
Thanks for this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My pleasure. Hopefully everyone including myself can learn from this, because I'm certainly no expert. Just a guy who like to take stuff apart to see how it works.
knowledge561 said:
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll do what I can. First let's see if I can get it to work right Working lots of O/T right now so I haven't had a heap of time.
Thanks so much for this hockeyfamily737!
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Thanks homie.
Temari x Shikamaru
Also I will possibly be able to help out on this as well if someone doesn't get it figured out by Sunday... been working alot of double shifts..
knowledge561 said:
Thanks because im Stumped!!!! If you manage to hook it up do you think you can throw in that green charging light? And when its not charging it turns blue when you touch it? Check out "ikun" to understand the lockscreen.
Temari x Shikamaru
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sent from my PG86100 using Tapatalk
Hey, nice introduction =)
If anyone is inerested in speeding up the process of testing your themes, I have created a Makefile/Windows Batch file for compressing themes and pushing them to the phone auto-magically
http://forums.miui.us/showthread.ph...ild-Script-(Windows-Unix)-Now-with-a-Makefile
Let me know if you guys have any problems!
Thank you for posting this amazing tutorial!
I am slowly fixing my lock screen, I'll post some before and after screen shots.
Before:
After:
thanks for this. i rlly needed it....
now to figure out more stuff...
steam374 said:
Thank you for posting this amazing tutorial!
I am slowly fixing my lock screen, I'll post some before and after screen shots.
Before:
After:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Terrific and this was the one I was trying to do today. Great job with this.
Brought to you from my EVOlutionary 3-Dimensional Smartphone
Wow! Great work... looking forward to more. Thanks hockeyfamily!
Sent from 3D A.W.E.S.O.M-O
Taking notes over PDF slides with the scribe pen has really saved me a lot of hassle. I love this function of the flyer. There's really only one way it could be better: Fullscreen support, or at least "more screen" support.
Not only does the HC bar take up space, but the menu/title bar on top is even bigger. The pdf viewer has the screen real estate of a 5inch phone.
PDF editing seems like only a moderately used feature, so I don't see this getting done on it's own. I'm offering a very modest reward for a fix.
I would be willing to donate for the removal of the huge uppermost Title/menu bar in PDF viewer, so that a double-tapped fitted pdf page will fill the new space. See the attached image. You can leave the small menu button in the corner if possible, or just get rid of it if it's too difficult.
I'm hoping this is as simple as modifying a few variables in the apk. I could be very wrong.
I can live with just the HC bar at the bottom.
Note: I have tried apps like repligo and ezpdf which do offer fullscreen support. However, annotating and changing annotation options takes many more steps than the HTC pdf viewer.
Secondary goal:
Apps like honeybar and honey hide widget cause all pen written annotations to be shifted up.
I believe the solution to the first problem would also allow an easy fix of the shifting pen annotations. I would like the PDF viewer to accept pen strokes properly with a hidden HC bar.
No one's willing to give it a shot? Ah well.
This will be my only bump.
I've attached the (unmodified, I think) HTCPDFViewer.apk from /system/app from LeeDroid's 4.1.0 rom.
I was the guy who removed the obnoxiously large language bar from Sony Ericsson's keyboard back when I was still using my u20i phone... unless HTC is particularly irritating about how it structures its resources, you're right that it is a matter of decompiling the APK, adjusting numbers, and recompiling it. Merely hiding is not difficult (making the Menu button semi-transparent is probably too difficult, though, but you can pick a ROM with the hardware buttons enabled).
Unfortunately it is also incredibly tedious to decompile and recompile everything right, from my experience of the keyboard hack. I'm not really up to it at the moment. Hope you can do it.
I've poked around in the archive. I wonder if I could just delete the ti.tle bar png or layout file. There doesn't seem to be a definitive title bar png
I'm also experimenting with apk multitool.
Since it's a stock rom app, is this venture going to be a lot more complicated than editing an xml line and then recompiling?
Here's where I'm at. Everything I know about android programming I've learned tonight, so this may be confusing and stupid sounding:
The decompiled apk has several things which could refer to the title bar.
dimens.xml has lines like
<dimen name="global_title_height">35.0dip</dimen>
<dimen name="editing_panel_header_height">56.0px</dimen>
<dimen name="editing_panel_header_margin">47.0px</dimen>
<dimen name="editing_panel_no_footer_header_margin">35.0px</dimen>
However there are also thousands of header and title lines from other xmls.
Can I just use a theme line in the manifest?
It uses the ActPDFReaderTheme whose parent is the HtcActionBar.FullScreen from the com.htc.resources.apk
These link to the common_mainnav xmls and pngs in the resources.
Do I need to find an HTC theme from the com.htc.resources.apk that doesn't have a title bar? Could I edit the com.htc.resources.apk and edit the pngs or delete the referencing lines in the styles.xml?
Thanks. I'll keep digging.
And btw, the bounty's still out if anyone can do it faster. I don't have much free time.
I think I've got this. I'm real close
I figured out how to decompile, edit xmls, recompile, copy original meta-infs and androidmanifest, and adb push.
The dimens.xml in the viewer apk has no effect on the bar. It's a standard template htcactionbar.fullscreen
I could direct the apk to a new theme, but I've decided just to try deleting or shrinking the bar from the com resources apk.
Good luck! Remember the apk you push back must be a signed one, probably via hacking the modified xml files back into the original signed apk.
Now I've run into a snag.
No matter how many margin and layout dimension variables in the com resource I set to 1.0px, I still have a black bar above the pdf.
Then I tried changing the theme reference in the pdfviewer.apk. It loads the file picker without an action bar, but as soon as I click a file it crashes. It seems (I think) that the program has too many calls for the action bar. I'm not a programmer. Do you know how I can get the program to simply ignore any lines referencing the "actionbar"?
Lines such as: "invoke-virtual {v3}, Lcom/htc/pdfviewer/ActPDFReader;->getActionBarHeight()I"
I also tried <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item> after the theme and I have the same effect of no title bar but a forceclose after selecting a file
Could you post the entirety of the relevant xml layout file?
porcupineadvocate said:
Could you post the entirety of the relevant xml layout file?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately there is no simple relevant layout file. I can't go any further with this project because I don't know programming. Here's my progress if anyone would like to give it a shot:
In the decompiled HTCPDFViewer is a \res\values\styles.xml
There is the line:
<style name="ActPDFReaderTheme" parent="@com.htc:style/HtcActionBar.FullScreen">
This tells the program to use the HTCactionbar.fullscreen template style in com.htc.resources.apk
Now there are two paths to take from here:
1) Changing the style template to @android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar.Fullscreen
or adding the requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE) line
Issue: This causes the file picker to load without a title fine, but as soon as a pdf loads, the program crashes.
How far I got: I simply deleted 2 lines referring to the actionbar in the PdfLoadingPage$LOADING_PAGE_Handler.smali and the pdf loads. However there is a now a black empty bar on the bottom, and any pen writing is being moved upwards.
I suspect this is because of the ActionBarMenuAdapter.smali that controls how the pen annotations are moved in relation to the actionbar. There are also 100 more lines referring the actionbar in the other smalis. You can find them all by searching the apk for "actionbar". A proper programmer could remove these lines, or more easily make every m_iActionBarHeight:I line refer to zero.
If someone can fix the programming, I suspect that this would also solve the hidden HC bar issue, allowing true fullscreen support!
2) Editing the com.htc.resources.apk
The styles.xml in this file has a NoTitleBar.Fullscreen theme that redirects to other xmls redirecting to different layout files and pngs.
I've looked through every dimens.xml and other xmls that may be even loosely linked to the actionbar. I even tried haphazardly changing every possibly connected dimension to 1.0px.
I then tried shrinking all of the related PNGs to 1x1 pixel.
The end result was just a funking looking grey and black bar at the top.
I have no idea where to find the dimensions controlling the size of the actionbar.
Thanks for any help! Warning: Recovery backup before pushing a new com.htc apk, if you don't do it correctly, things can get messy with the OS.
porcupineadvocate said:
Could you post the entirety of the relevant xml layout file?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok I may have lied. There are one or two files I wasn't sure about.
These are from the xmls in layout folders of com.htc apk.
Can you take a look and see if there are simple line(s) to change here? notepad++ is great.
I already attempted to edit all of the dimens.xml dimensions. I can't remember if I got all of the dimensions in these files too.
The bar seems to be about 56 pixels. I gathered that from reduced editing view dimensions but I could be wrong.
Not that it is a big deal for a minor issue like this in a low traffic forum like EVO View but "bounty threads" are strictly prohibited by xda.
I doubt the mods will hassle you since this isn't a heavily travelled thread but they might shut you down at any second. Good idea to get some PM's going with anyone who is helping you.
Good luck.
Sent from my PG41200 using Tapatalk
Post the decompiled HTPDFViewer, please. I particularly want to see the contents of res/layout/*.xml files.
As a tip, don't delete any elements; just resize them to zero height/width if possible. Deleting will cause crashes when the program tries to reference them.
porcupineadvocate said:
Post the decompiled HTPDFViewer, please. I particularly want to see the contents of res/layout/*.xml files.
As a tip, don't delete any elements; just resize them to zero height/width if possible. Deleting will cause crashes when the program tries to reference them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Here it is.
Woops I didn't realize bounties were prohibited, especially with so many developers asking for "donations"
Delete this if you'd like. I didn't mean to break the rules.
Donations and bounties are different. Donations are thanks for work done, bounties are offer of compensation to do work. If they allowed bounty threads xda would be overrun with them.
No big deal. I doubt the mods even visit this thread. Just wanted to give you heads up to establish pm conversations in case they did
Sent from my PG41200 using Tapatalk
No progress since my last update on the programming front. However I have been playing with the lcd density changer.
Setting it to 170 from 160 and enabling the GB like bar on top has interesting results. The pdfviewer only edits properly when I use Honeyhide or Honeybar. So we know that disabling the notification bar and having a working pdfviewer is possible.
However, I found I have the best pdf editing real estate when I set the lcd density to very low, like 120. In fact, not only are the title and HC bars smaller, but the pen seems to be more accurate too!
Maybe this information will help with our goal.
EDIT: at 120 and below, the scribe color wheel pops up on the wrong side. Still works though. Other tablet functions are much slower and there's some screen corruption too. It's not a permanent solution, but works for annotating pdfs.
Making a Bootanimation
Introduction
Hello xda,
I’m not really into Android development at the moment as I’m just not familiar with anything coding or related, but while my knowledge of Android may need to grow some more I can share things that I already master a bit more. After all, this forum is a place to share knowledge so I hope I can help some people while I am enjoying my stay here on the forums.
Since most of the forum users are here to get the limits out of our phone and probably want to customize it too, it’s most likely that you want to change your bootanimation at some point. Most custom ROM’s already have a customized bootanimation integrated and there are also quite some bootanimations available in the theming section, but what if you want to make your own customized animation?
I wrote this tutorial on how to create a bootanimation for the people who want to experiment with the making of bootanimations, as well as the people that are good at making animations already but don’t really know what to do next. I will try to explain the making of a basic animation using the tools a regular pc user can get or already has, and also get a little more in depth at some points for people who are not satisfied with only the basics. The goal of this tutorial is to get even the less experienced users on their way, not to make the best animation ever. Also, I wrote how I did it, and how I would suggest doing it, but there might be better ways to do certain things described. If you know how to do it easier and/or better, please feel free to leave feedback.
What you can expect in this tutorial:
• What software to use
• How to make a simple animation in MS Paint
• Make an image sequence
• Make the package ready to be installed on your phone
• Porting an already existing animation
Animation: What software to use?
Before we want to make our bootanimation we first want to plan out what software we are going to use. The first thing is of course the animation. Depending on what you’re after and your level of skill these are some of my recommendations:
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"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Microsoft Paint – The Gimp – Adobe Photoshop – Adobe Flash Professional – Adobe After Effects
Microsoft Paint
Maybe it surprises you, or maybe you just didn’t think of it, but MS Paint is actually a good tool to start making your animation. Anyone with the Windows operating system has it installed by default so this is the software I’m going to use for the animation in this tutorial.
The Gimp - http://www.gimp.org/
Already a bit more advanced than MS Paint and therefore a better option if you want to make a more complicated animation and can find your way through the options the software offers. Best option if you want to go advanced but don’t want to spend any cash.
Adobe Photoshop - http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
I can barely imagine someone who has never heard of this software before. This piece of software is pretty much the standard in the image editing world, and I highly recommend using this software if you can afford to buy it.
Adobe Flash - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html
This software maybe is the best software to use for this matter, its interface is designed for the making of animations and if you know how to use it (which I sadly don’t) I recommend it. But again, it doesn’t come for free.
Adobe After Effects - http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html
Even though this software is mostly used for compositing effects on videos it does an awesome job on the more complicated animations and motion graphics. That’s why I’m using this software myself when making bootanimations.
This is some of the software I would recommend using. Of course there are many more alternatives as well as more advanced software out there, 3D applications for example like Blender, Maya, Cinema4D and 3Ds Max could also be useful depending on the complexity of your project. Right now I’m just going to stick with MS Paint for the sake of this tutorial.
Post 1/4
How to make a simple animation in MS Paint
Note: The following step by step tutorial is based on a Dutch Windows system; certain menu entries might not be well translated and are shown in Dutch in the screenshots.
The Base
This is the part where the animating happens. Make your animation using the software that you own and are comfortable with. The goal is to make a sequence of images in the .png format which the phone can read and display while the phone boots thus displaying the animation. If you have never changed anything to your phone before, you see a nice little Samsung logo animation after the kernel has booted. You can find this animation in /system/media and it’s called bootani.qmg (Samsung QImage file made using Samsung theme software). This package is basically the same package we’re going to make ourselves but with a different extension. Now that you know roughly what we want to create we will move on.
We will start the process by launching Paint.
Code:
• Simply type ‘paint’ in the field on the start menu when you are on Windows 7 or Vista or access it from the ‘All Programs’ tab.
• When in Paint, look for the entry ‘Properties’ under ‘File’ in paint.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/1.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/2.jpg[/IMG]
• Set the image properties to 240 pixels in width and 400 pixels in height, this is the resolution of our Samsung Galaxy 3.
• First pick the paint bucket tool from the tool menu and fill the background with black.
• Next search for the Android logo on Google Images, find a .png file or [URL="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Assets/android_logo.png"]download mine[/URL], copy it and paste it in the paint window.
The reason that I’m looking for a PNG file is that it holds an alpha channel so that the background is transparent (Paint transforms it to black when pasted directly from the clipboard).
• Without de-selecting the just pasted image right click it and choose the option called something along the lines of ‘Scale’ or ‘Transform’
• Then set the horizontal and vertical value to 75 percent.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/3.jpg[/IMG]
• Since the pasting messed up the image properties simply repeat the first step. Set the height and width value to 240 x 400.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/4.jpg[/IMG]
• Now make a little progress bar in the middle of our Android logo which we are then going to animate.
• First choose the rectangular shape tool with rounded corners.
• Next change the line thickness to the thickest, the contour to solid color and the fill to none.
• Draw the shape on top of the logo.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/5.jpg[/IMG]
Now the base of our animation is ready.
• Save it as a .bmp on your computer and name it ‘bootanimation_base.bmp’
The Animating
We are now going to prepare our folders for the animation. An Android bootanimation generally consists out of two parts:
• One that could be described as the intro. (part0)
• And one that is in a loop until the system boots up. (part1)
We find this ‘intro animation’ commonly placed in the ‘part0’ folder as a set of images. In the ‘part1’ folder we put the animation that we want to loop for the rest of the time.
You can hold on to this standard, but you can also make your own architecture. For the sake of this tutorial I will drop the ‘intro’ part and go straight to the looping animation. In this case we only need the part1 folder.
Code:
• Make a folder called ‘bootanimation’ like I did in the above screenshot.
• Inside the bootanimation folder create the ‘part1’ folder which will hold our animation. We don’t need the ‘part0’ folder in this tutorial as I mentioned above.
We are now ready to make our first frame.
• Select the brush tool, set the line to the thickest again and leave the color black.
• Then with the brush carefully draw a little on the right of the progress bar and with a little space in between the rest of the bar. This way you're making a little green bit in a black bar.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/7.jpg[/IMG]
This is our first frame! We are going to repeat the next step a couple of times down the road so pay attention:
• Now choose ‘Save as’ from the file menu.
• Save you’re frame as a .png file in the ‘part1’ folder and name it ‘01.png’ Caution: Do not overwrite the bmp file by choosing ‘save’, choose ‘save as’ only!
You can probably see where this is going.
• Once you’ve saved your file open your ‘bootanimation_base.bmp’
• Draw a little more on the left and a little less on the right side shifting the green bit in comparison to 01.png.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/8.jpg[/IMG]
• Now choose ‘Save as’ again from the file menu.
• Save you’re frame as a .png file in the ‘part1’ folder and name it ‘02.png’
• Repeat this process of editing the bmp and saving it as a PNG until the green bit is shifted all the way to the right, and you have a couple of frames in your ‘part1’ folder. [I]Caution: Do not overwrite the bmp file![/I]
• Once your frame looks like the following picture open the bmp one more time;
• Fill up the entire bar with black and save it as a png changing the number so it follows up the last png you saved.
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/09.png[/IMG] [IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/10.png[/IMG]
Your folder should look something like this:
[IMG]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/56762733/Bootanimations/Tutorial/Screenshots/11.jpg[/IMG]
And that’s going to be your animation!
Making a PNG Sequence in After Effects
Note: If you followed the MS Paint tutorial and if you don’t own After Effects in general you can skip this part.
While Adobe After Effects is mainly seen as a video effects and motion graphics compositor, it is not only capable of exporting video, but also image sequences! Say you have made your animation in After Effects, you can simply let After Effects export each frame as a .png file to your desired location.
If you’re making a typical bootanimation with intro:
• Set the workspace to the intro of the animation, in the screenshot the intro takes 3 seconds.
• Choose ‘Composition’, ‘Add to Render Queue’.
• Switch to the Render Queue
• Change the ‘Lossless’ settings to PNG Sequence and ‘Output to’ your ‘part0’ folder.
• Click ‘Render’
• For the ‘part1’, change your work area to the second part of the animation.
• Add it to the Render Queue and change the settings like you did for the first part.
• Output to the ‘part1’ folder and click ‘Render’
You now have the animation rendered out in a two part PNG sequence!
Post 2/4
Making the Bootanimation.zip
You’ve now probably made your animation, either in Paint following the tutorial, or in your own way.
Samsung stores their bootanimation as bootani.qmg as mentioned above. The file is actually an archive like a .zip, and that’s exactly what we are going to make. In order for our phone to display the animation we need to make a bootanimation.zip with inside it our ‘part1’ folder we just made. A desc.txt file on the same level as the ‘part’ folders tells the phone how to play the animation:
• It tells the phone in what resolution to play the animation, which in our case is 240 400
• The following number is the frame rate in which the .png sequence has to be displayed, in this example it’s 25 frames per second. The human eye experiences everything above 25 frames per second as a fluid movement, so this is your minimum frame rate if this is the effect you’re after. Anything below 25 frames per second appears choppy to the eye (which could also be an effect you purposely want to achieve). I recommend 25 frames per second for fluid animations as more frames per second could cause our phone to display the animation incorrect, because it gets too much images to process at once.
• The next two lines are the folders that are used in the animation with the number of loops and the delay between the animations in front of it. The first folder loops 1 time and doesn’t delay, the second loops 0 (=infinite) times and doesn’t have a delay either.
We have to transform all the above pieces into a bootanimation.zip. While we could do that manually I recommend using the Boot Animation Creator made by despotovski01. Download the software from the thread and install it on your computer.
• Open the program and follow the wizard.
• Select the ‘bootanimation’ folder with your ‘part1’ folder inside and proceed to step 2 of the wizard.
• Now in this window, choose ‘edit’ while holding the first line selected and make it 240 in width and 400 in height.
• Since our ‘tutorial animation’ is only 8 frames long I don’t want to go for the fluid animation, but rather the choppier one. In this case I’m making the animation go 10 FPS (Frames Per Second).
• When you’re ready, click ‘set’
• To actually assign the folder with images to the animation choose ‘Add a loop’
• Choose the folder from the dropdown menu (which shouldn’t be hard, because there’s only one option)
• Set the number of loops to 0, which makes it loop infinite, and leave the delay on 0. Press ‘Add’
• Click next, on the next screen press ‘Save’ and save the bootanimation as ‘bootanimation.zip’ somewhere to your computer.
• Now the bootanimation.zip is ready to be installed on your phone!
Make the package ready to be installed on your phone
If you’re going to use the bootanimation (or any future bootanimations you’ll make) for your personal use only, you can use an application like Root explorer to simply paste the bootanimation.zip in your /system/media folder. If you’re going to share the bootanimations like on the forums for example it could also be convenient to make an update.zip. An update.zip is a package with a couple of scripts and some files inside which can be flashed through Clock Work Mod Recovery and is used to get files in the internal memory of the phone, like in /system/media. CWM Recovery is integrated in most custom kernels and can be accessed by pressing both of the volume buttons and the menu button while turning on the phone.
To make an update.zip you can simply download this .zip archive open it with a decent archiver, preferably WinRAR or 7Zip and navigate to /system/media. You’ll see a bootanimation.zip placeholder inside, which you can then (without extracting the archive) replace with your own bootanimation.zip! The archive you now have is ready to be placed on your SD-card and flashed through CMW Recovery. You can rename the update.zip to whatever you want.
Making a simple GIF Animation preview
Now that you’ve made your bootanimation, you’ll probably want to present it to the forums. While posting a couple frames of the animation will give an idea to users what animation they’re going to get, it is also very useful to make an animated preview of said thing. A quick google on ‘GIF maker’ will give you several options of online GIF makers that just let you select the PNG’s you just made and make them into a neat little GIF animation. While this is a fine method I would recommend everyone who owns Adobe Photoshop to do it this way:
• Open Photoshop
• Double click the workspace to ‘open’, or select ‘File’ and click ‘open’
• Navigate to the folder you stored your PNG’s in and select the first frame of your animation.
• Now check the box with ‘Sequence’ behind it and click ‘open’
• Select the frames per second you want the animation to play in. Generally you want to go with 25, but I’m going with 10 as I explained above.
• Now click ‘File’, ‘Save for Web & Devices’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S’
• In the window that popped up, select GIF from the dropdown menu, change the ‘Looping options’ to ‘Forever’ and hit save.
• Upload your GIF to the public section of Dropbox, to Photobucket or any other online storage service to insert the image in a post!
Post 3/4
How to port an existing bootanimation
There’s a large amount of bootanimations available on the web, but you’ll soon discover that unless their specifically made for our phones the resolution will be to big almost all the time. That means that if you want to use or share the animation you have to port it first in order to make it work on phones with a smaller resolution. Since full fluid animations of 25 FPS are over 100 frames long most of the time it would be a real pain in the neck to scale them all down one by one. I will talk about two ways to port an animation to a smaller resolution.
The easy way
The simplest way of porting an animation would be to just adjust the resolution values in the desc.txt provided in the bootanimation.zip. While this will probably work, it’s not the most accurate way of porting an animation. Since our phone is not the fastest one it is not only the resolution which might make a bootanimation unplayable, but it could also be a pretty hard task for our lower-end device to load such big images in an animation while booting.
The advanced and more accurate way
Editing every image individually would be a really hard task, but would result in a much more accurate and potentially better port. That’s why it is my recommendation to do it anyway, but that’s where Adobe Photoshop comes in! Adobe has made wonderful batch system that lets you process huge amounts of images with a click of the mouse. This is how that works:
• Download the ‘to be ported’ bootanimation.zip and extract it.
• Open Photoshop
• Click ‘Window’ and check ‘Actions’ if it isn’t checked already
• Click the ‘New’ icon at the bottom of the Actions panel and call the action ‘Scale down bootanimation’ in the window that pops up.
• Click record.
• Open a random frame from the animation.
• Now select ‘Image’, ‘Image Size’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+I’
• In the window that comes up change the width and height values to 240 x 400 pixels and click ‘OK’
• Next click ‘File’, ‘Save as’ or press ‘Ctrl+Shift+S’
• Save the image as a .png and be sure not to overwrite something as this is just the preparing of the actual resizing of hundreds of images. (It doesn’t matter where you save it, to Photoshop it only matters if you save it. The ‘save as’ settings are going to be overridden as you’ll see later)
• Once you’ve saved the file, close the image.
• Now click the rectangular ‘stop’ button at the bottom of the Actions panel and you’ve recorded the action!
• Delete the just saved image from your computer as we don’t need it anymore and it could mess up the batch process.
Your action should now look something like this:
In the next part we’re going to do the actual resizing:
• Click ‘File’, ‘Automate, ‘Batch’
• The ‘Batch’ window should pop up.
• Select ‘Scale down bootanimation’ as action from the dropdown menu.
• Choose the source to be a folder and then choose the folder with images to be resized.
• Be sure to check ‘Override Action “Open” Commands.
• Choose the destination to be a folder as well and choose a new folder to store the resized images.
• Be sure to check ‘Overide Action “Save As” Commands’ as well
• For the File Naming select the ‘4 Digit Serial Number’ + ‘Extension’ as shown in the screenshot below.
• When everything is set up like in the screenshot, hit ‘OK’ and watch the magic happen!
• Once the operation is completed your downscaled PNG’s will be waiting for you in the folder you selected.
• You can use this ‘action’ now every time you need to resize an animation to this resolution.
While some of you may want to use this method but don’t have Photoshop, I’ve found out about a simple plugin for The Gimp to do pre-scripted batch operations on lots of images just like Photoshop. It’s called David’s Batch Processor and you can install it from here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
Requesting a bootanimation
We are approaching the end of the tutorial; I hope you found it useful. There’s one thing I want to mention though. Even though I’ve tried to explain the most things about bootanimations it’s most likely that you didn’t become the best artist of all time because of this. If you want to have your own custom bootanimation, or want to port an existing one and don’t feel like you can do it yourself, feel free to PM me or leave a reply here, because I’m having fun making/tweaking/porting bootanimations and that way I’m also contributing a little to this forum.
The End
Thanks for taking the time to read this (or a part of this) tutorial and I really hope it helped some people. This is my first tutorial, so don’t hold back to tell me how to improve it (or change any grammatical issues). If you still have questions you can leave a reply or PM me.
Credits go to:
This great community and its developers
Nishant_713 who helped me out the first time I made a bootanimation.
Ava.tar for feedback and his bootanimation work
Despotovski01 for his cool little bootanimation.zip maker
Samsung for the Galaxy 3
Adobe for their Creative Suite and 80% discount on CS4 for students.
Useful links:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1234611 Bootanimation maker by despotovski01
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1602879 Bootanimations for Galaxy 3 Index by Ava.tar
Let me know if any more links should come in this list.
Post 4/4
Copyright april 2012 © All right reserved Wiggierip
Good Work!
BTW You should have posted this in the "Android Themes Section" so that everyone else can see it and there were some questions about bootanimation posted there.
Good Luck!
Thank you for this comprehensive guide. Its awesome!
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CleanKpu rom
ak700 said:
Good Work!
BTW You should have posted this in the "Android Themes Section" so that everyone else can see it and there were some questions about bootanimation posted there.
Good Luck!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks , yeah I didn't really know where to start it... Most of it is specifically written for our phone. Like the way the bootanimation is stored and the resolution for example.
Brilliant work! I'll post a link to your thread in the bootanimation index. You deserve many thanks!
wow! finally a tutorial that I can understand
Awesome tutorial! Thank you!
Good research and great work
Oh finall an in-depth tutorial.......i had already made my bootanimation and dint have any idea what to do next....lol....
Thanks for the tut!!
This is really one of the most detailed but still very comprehensive Tutorial about bootanimations I've seen yet! Big probs for that!
There is an aspect in editing bootanimations and I've been thinking about it for months, but still don't have a solution:
What I want to do is editing a bios-bootanimation to fit perfectly to my device and ROM.
This is an example how a bios animation looks like (not the one I would use as base):
Android Bios Bootanimation[/CENTER]
Preview
I only have to change a few parts within the parts to make it fit to my configuration.
Is that possible in a relative fast way? Something like appending changes to several pictures in a batch operation or anything like that? That would be enough for me. But I didn't find any tool I could use that way.
Hope you can help me out!
t-rip said:
This is really one of the most detailed but still very comprehensive Tutorial about bootanimations I've seen yet! Big probs for that!
There is an aspect in editing bootanimations and I've been thinking about it for months, but still don't have a solution:
What I want to do is editing a bios-bootanimation to fit perfectly to my device and ROM.
This is an example how a bios animation looks like (not the one I would use as base)
I only have to change a few parts within the parts to make it fit to my configuration.
Is that possible in a relative fast way? Something like appending changes to several pictures in a batch operation or anything like that? That would be enough for me. But I didn't find any tool I could use that way.
Hope you can help me out!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, batch operations can be recorded in Photoshop and then applied pretty easiy like I wrote in the tutorial, the Gimp has this plugin called "David's Batch Processor" that I found after some research:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
It does some basic batch operations as well. If this will help you out is highly depending on what effect you want to achieve. If you actually want to change the animation it's going to be A LOT harder... Let me know if you found this useful
Any requests for a bootanimation to be ported or to be made?
Please let me know, I have fun porting/making them
as the adobe after effects require a 64 bit windows os., am having 32 bit os...can i able to use it for creating my own boot animation
austin266 said:
as the adobe after effects require a 64 bit windows os., am having 32 bit os...can i able to use it for creating my own boot animation
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well.. I used and still use After Effects CS4, both on a 32bit and now on a 64bit system. Unfortunately After Effect stopped supporting 32bit systems since CS5 came out, so unless you can get your hands on After Effects CS4 you're not going to be able to run it on a 32bit system . If you're really planning on getting AE I would recommend getting a 64bit Winodws copy. What are your system specifications?
@wiggerip if you are bored, maybe port the cm9 official boot animation to g3. It looks really great
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CyanogenMod 9!
bscraze said:
@wiggerip if you are bored, maybe port the cm9 official boot animation to g3. It looks really great
Cheers
Sent from my GT-i9003 powered by Stable and Smooth CyanogenMod 9!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I believe thats already done by SerkSerk: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1513419&highlight=bootanimation
Anything else ?
@wiggerip
hi mate
thanks for the reply
my system requrements
2gb ram
ububtu 11.10 32 bit 0s
2.00 ghz dual core processor
5yrs old laptop
270 rom