ThemeMaker McDeb is very easy to use.
WHAT’S HOT
It places everything you need to see on a single screen. It
provides program controls both in menus and in control buttons so
you can work with the program in the manner most comfortable to you.
It can generate Standard, QVGA-, and VGA-resolution themes.
It can import background graphics in a wide variety of formats.
It can even generate “Thumbnail” and full-sized example screens for
displaying themes you create on a web site.
PROGRAM FEATURES
ThemeMaker McDeb runs entirely on
your desktop system, so unless otherwise noted, the screens you see
are as they would appear on a Windows desktop. ThemeMaker McDeb
starts with an all-in-one screen that shows the current theme in Portrait
and Landscape previews:
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 364px; height: 391px;">
ThemeMaker
McDeb Main Screen (click on the image above for a full-sized image)
one at a time, I’m going to create a theme and, in the process, show
you how the program works. To begin, we will select a theme
type and name:
Since I’m using one of the new HiDPI Pocket PCs, we’ll make
a VGA theme. Making a QVGA theme is essentially the same process,
but you can use a lower-resolution background. Likewise, making
a standard theme is essentially the same, but without any consideration
of landscape orientation. The next step is to load a background
image. You can use either the “Load Image(s)” button or “Load
Image(s)” under the “Image” menu.
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000568/review/LoadImage-sm.gif" alt=""
The Load Image dialog shows the Main Today Image and the Menu Image
at the top. Generally, you’ll use the same image for both to
give the menu a transparent effect, but ThemeMaker McDeb allows you
to load two different images. At the lower right of the Load
Image dialog, are the options that allow you to do this. There
are also two buttons in the “Background” section that allow you to
set the background colors for the Main and Menu image. This
affects how the image changes when you use the “transparency function
that we will look at later.
At the lower left of the Load Image dialog are
the sizing options. Since I would rather use the whole image,
rather than just the portion that will fit on the screen, I will use
the “Size Image to Fit” option:
When you size the image to fit, you can fit both width and height
(X & Y), just width, or just height. If you select Fit to
X, you can select whether the image is top, center, or bottom justified. Likewise, if you select Fit to Y, you can select whether the image
is left, center, or right justified.
If you Clip the image, instead of fitting it, you
have the option to “pan” the image. Panning means that you can
click-and-drag the image to get the section of the image you want. There are also options to Flip the image, either top to bottom or
left to right.
The final option on the Load Image screen shows
you the Area Used in Portrait and Landscape orientations:
If
you press either of the two buttons, a marquee effect surrounds the
area of the image that will appear in that orientation:
Area
of image used for the menu in portrait orientation
Area
of image used for the main screen in portrait orientation
After clicking [OK]
at the bottom right of the Load Image dialog, your images are loaded
onto the main screen of ThemeMaker McDeb:
The dark text on the dark house is very hard to read. I could
make the text lighter, but then it would disappear over the snow-laden
tree limb at the top of the picture. Instead, I will adjust
the “transparency” of the images to make the whole image quite a bit
lighter. The transparency options control both the color which
is used as the background when applying transparency and the amount
of transparency:
Clicking on the “Transparency
Color” button brings up the color chooser:
Since I just want
to “lighten” the picture, I will stick with the default white color.
The transparency slider moves from 0 (no transparency) to 255 (no
image, just the transparency color). After working with the
slider a bit, I settled on a Transparency to about 140. Here
is how that looks in the Landscape Preview:
Our theme already
looks pretty good, but there are other options that allow you to adjust
system colors to match the rest of your theme. Since the house
is a nice brick red, I want to modify the system colors to brick red
as well. To do that, we’ll use the Color Tools:
alt="">
The drop-down box at
the top of the Color Tools drops a list of the various elements that
you can edit with the Color Tools:
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000568/review/ColorToolsList.gif" alt="">
The Upper Navigation
Bar colors set the color of the top bar. The color does a gradient
shift from the Left to the Right color. The same is true for the
Message Bar and Important Message Bar colors. Once you select
which element you want to change, you use the Get Color tool to choose
the color. This will pop-up the same Color Chooser we saw earlier.
After a bit of experimentation, I found that the first row of colors
(with equal values for green and blue and twice that value for red)
matched the color of the house nicely. Here is what the theme
looks like after making those choices. When you edit a color of
an element that is not normally displayed, the preview will show that
element so you can see how the color choices look.
alt="">My theme with the
task bar showing
My
theme with the message bar showing
My
theme with the important message bar showing
My
theme with the menu showing
You can also use
the “Color Pick Tool” to select colors for your theme elements.
The Color Pick Tool button toggles the tool on and off. When the
tool is on, if you click on any color in the preview image, the currently
selected screen element will be set to that color. It may be much
easier to pick appropriate colors off the image than it would be to
choose the colors from the Color Chooser.
In addition to the theme elements you can color using
the Color Tools, you can also use the “Internal Colors” button to call
up a dialog to allow you to change the colors that your Pocket PC will
use in various system dialogs:
alt="">
bars that appear in the background of the File Explorer and other applets
and the color of the rotating dots that indicate a tap-and-hold in progress.
The final buttons of the Color Tools section allow
you to reset the color scheme to the colors that were set when you started,
undo the last color change, and automatically set the message bar to
the same colors as the Navigation Bar.
At this point, my theme is complete. I can
simply tap the Save button (
style="width: 36px; height: 32px;" align="middle">
could tap the Theme Transfer button (
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000568/review/TransferButton.gif" alt="" style="width: 32px; height: 29px;"
align="middle">
) to call up a dialog that will
allow me to transfer it directly onto my Pocket PC via an ActiveSync
connection:
alt=""> The Transfer dialog
shows you Directory trees for both the Pocket PC and the PC.
You can select any directory on either. Once the directory is
selected, the list box to the right will show the available themes.
If you select themes on the PC, you can delete them from the PC or
transfer them to the Pocket PC. If you select themes on the
Pocket PC, you can transfer them to the PC to or delete them from the PPC.
Unfortunately,
I ran into the first and only bug I discovered with ThemeMaker McDeb:
If you look closely at the dialog above, you will note that my SD
Card shows up twice. What does not show up at all is my iPAQ
File Store. I store my themes in the root directory of the iPAQ
File Store so they are always available and so they show up in the
Today Screen settings. Unfortunately, due to this bug, I can
not put them there directly.
When you distribute
themes through the web, it is helpful to have screen captures of the
theme to show people what it looks like. Since the theme packages
all the information together, there isn’t an easy way to do this with
just the theme file itself. Forturnately, ThemeMaker McDeb includes
functions to allow you create the images you need to show off your
theme on the web:
ThemeMaker McDeb
can create images, essentially like the preview panels, for the main
screen, the main screen with the menu showing, the main screen in
landscape mode, or a small-sized “thumbnail” image. Screen captures
are stored in .JPG format.
That brings us to
the final functionality built into ThemeMaker McDeb: The program
can also load existing themes so you don’t have to start from scratch
each time. This allows you to create a theme and then modify
it later after you try it out. It also allows you to take themes
from other sources and modify them to fit your individual tastes.
Settings
ThemeMaker has a
small set of options that are available through the Settings dialog
which you get either by pressing the “Settings” button or selecting
“Settings” from the “File” menu. The settings dialog allows
you to set which text appears in the previews, including the names
that appear in the owner and example appointments areas. You
can also set ThemeMaker McDeb to remember the directories you use
either for each time you start the program or constantly. Finally,
you can set the Message Bar colors to automatically change to the
same colors as the Navigation bar or the opposite colors or you can
allow them to be changed as you wish.
HELP SUPPORT
ThemeMaker McDeb has built-in help that covers all the features of
the program. In addition, there is
Tips and Tricks page. You can also get additional themes, created
by McDeb herself, at the web site.
Theme McDeb doesn’t run
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
on the Pocket PC at all, thus these system requirements are for your
desktop system. ThemeMaker McDeb runs on Windows XP, 2000, Me,
or 9x with a minimum screen resolution of 1024×768. It will
not display properly if you use large fonts or custom dpi settings. In order to transfer themes to your Pocket PC you will need ActiveSync
or a storage card reader/writer on your PC.
BUGS AND WISHES
As mentioned earlier, I did find one bug in the program: When
you select directories for transfering themes, it lists my SD Card
twice and my iPAQ File Store not at all. I’m not sure if this
is something unique to the iPAQ hx4700, the iPAQ line, or any Pocket
PC with a File Store.
I also had one wish: In creating my theme, I wished
I could pick the landscape image from the bottom of the image, rather
than the top. Just being able to “pan” the resized image would
solve this problem, but if you could use separate images for portrait
and landscape, as you can with the main image and the menu image,
that would provide a work-around and add some additional possibilities
as well.
You can purchase ThemeMaker McDeb 4.0
PURCHASING
the pocketnow Store for $18. There is also a
day trial version.
PROS
- Allows quick and easy creation of Standard, QVGA, and
VGA themes - Imports images from virtually
any graphics program - Allows easy manipulation
of image transparency - Can save the theme to the desktop or transfer the theme
directly to the Pocket PC
CONS
- Does not allow separate
pans of the base image for portrait and landscape modes
One of the priciples that drove the development
OVERALL IMPRESSION
of ThemeMaker McDeb was to eliminate the features that were hardly
ever used in order to keep things simpler. The program is extremely
easy to use and, with the exception of the wish I noted earlier, I
didn’t find any features I missed.
I confess that I have created very few themes up
to this point, having been more content to download and use other
people’s themes. Using ThemeMaker McDeb 4.0 for this review
changed my mind on that. I plan to make a number of themes,
using my own pictures, in the near future. The “catch-phrase” of Debbie McCormick’s web site is “the
personal in PDA.” ThemeMaker McDeb gives me what I need
to make my PDA even more personal with themes I create myself. If that appeals to you, then you need to get ThemeMaker McDeb.
All
screenshots in this review are taken using
SOTI’s Pocket Controller Pro
No related post found.
