First, let me just start out by saying that, I don’t know how many people were in charge of making the themes work on the HUB, but apparently they never talked to each other. Because that would be the only thing that I can think of as to why some of the theme xml’s are the way they are.
Anyway, for some tips. This is not supposed to be a guide, but are just some tips that I have had to learn the hard way, so I hope that they are helpful to others.
COMMON XML’s
FIrst, in each “views” xml, such as “rv_gallery_browse_page.xml” you will see a “include” line that says:
or
These include lines control what you see at the top of each view (except the weather & time). They control the position & size of “Filter, Dashboard, etc. icons” as well as the “Video, Music, etc” icon in the top left corner and the text next to it and the “page counter”.
However, if you are working with mulitple views, you may not want those things to show up in the same place for every view. So what you will want to do is to copy those xml’s and then rename the copies. Such as, if you want them different for the gallery view, you would name the include xml to something like “rv_browse_common_widgets_gallery.xml” and then rename it in the Gallery xml also. Now you can control how those things look in that view, but it not affect how they look in another view.
Also, if you don’t want the “Filter, Dashboard, etc.” icons to show up, (I think that they are kind of useless myself since there are shortcut buttons on the remote), you can open the “Common_Widgets” xml and just delete the lines that start with: “<imgbtn”. If you do this though, you will also want to delete the line in the “View” xml which says:
This will keep the HUB from trying to go to those buttons when you push the up arrow on the remote.
PREVIEW VIEW (rv_browse_preview.xml)
There a something I found while doing my mod that I have posted on my Mini-Theming thread. One thing that I found is that there doesn’t seem to be a rhym or reason for how the description lines are written. In the xml you will find lines that start:
<table…>
<text text=“@@description_0”… />
etc.
AND
<wrapper…>
<text text=“@@description_0” … />
etc.
I don’t really know what these lines are suppose to do, considering their compexity, but I did find that you can delete these lines and replace them with something simpler like this:
etc.
And you will get the same outcome. Or at least that is what I have seen doing my mods. Now if I could just figure out how to disable the text when it’s not focused.
Another thing is, that if you try to do a mod similar to my Preview Mod, where it shows the thumbnails and you don’t want the scolling to be sloooow, you will want to delete the folder/video icons (the little icons that show up to the left of the text in the original view). If you don’t, these icons slow down the scrolling. To delete these icons, find the lines that say:
<wrapper w=“114” h=“22” scale_type=“fixratio” scale=“100” align=“hcenter”>
etc.
And delete these lines. Now scrolling should be about as fast as it was with just the text.
ICON ASPECT RATIO
Here’s a little tip on the icon ratios. For most icons you will see a line something like this:
<wrapper y=“475” w=“114” h=“161” align=“hcenter” scale=“100” scale_type=“fixratio” selected_scale=“100”>
<image name=“th0”…>
etc.
If you look at the first line, it says “scale_type”, this is how it tells how to scale the icon. For “fixratio”, this will scale the icon to either the width or the height (which ever is larger on the actual icon) but keep the aspect ratio.
So if the line says w=“300” h=“300”, but your icon is 200 X 178, it will scale the width of the icon to 300, but only scale the height to 278.
But if you change “fixratio” to “pan”, this will cause it to stretch the icon to fit what ever the line says the width & height should be. So if the line says w=“300” h=“300”, and you icon is 200 X 178, now it will make the icon 300 X 300 on the screen.
Just remember, this can’t be used for every view, becuase certain views like List View are the same for Movie, Music & Photos, so trying to do this for say movies in this view will distort music cover art and photos.
LAYERS
For most of you that have worked with either Photoshop or GIMP understand what layers are. For those that are not fimiliar with what layers are, they are stacked images (one image stacked on top of another). So say you have a background & you another image on top of it, well that would be another layer.
The xml’s work in much the same way. Each set of lines is a layer, and what ever is first will be at the bottom. So if you have lines like this:
etc.
<wrapper w=“176” h=“176” scale=“100” scale_type=“pan” align=“hcenter,top”>
<image name=“th0” image=“@@browse_0_thumbnail” default_image=“@@default_thumbnail_0” x=“60” y=“176” scale=“100” />
etc.
Then the “Description” will appear underneath the “Thumbnail” (or a layer below). If you were to change the lines to:
<wrapper w=“176” h=“176” scale=“100” scale_type=“pan” align=“hcenter,top”>
<image name=“th0” image=“@@browse_0_thumbnail” default_image=“@@default_thumbnail_0” x=“60” y=“176” scale=“100” />
etc.
etc.
Now the “Description” will appear on top of the “Thumbnail”.
I have more tips, and will post them later when I get a chance. I hope that these tips will be helpful.
