Making Your Wishes Come True

The other day Dr. Jim made a smartphone wish list and I just want to take a second to address some of his wishes and some other users. No, I can’t make the scroll bar go onto the left side until MS decides to prioritize it and this is the best I have to offer on multitouch at the moment, but I can give you a taskbar that has color gradients instead of being flat (that’s a pic of my taskbar :)), give you flicker-free tv-out, a 6 button gamepad, get S2U2 to mimic TF3D, fix the 6.5 lock delay, rearrange 6.5 programs in the start menu and provide bigger buttons.

Let’s do a quick one. Here is a bluetooth gamepad that’s been around for a while. It seems to have mixed results depending on the device so look into it before buying it but it does support  WM phones.

To remove the flicker in Core Player with the tv-out cables make sure you have it set to ‘directdraw’ and the flicker will be gone.

If you would like S2U2 to look more like TF3D then just use Demonizator’s skin.

Check out this post for removing the delay in the 6.5 device lock.

To make your phone more finger friendly just switch to 6.5 and you’ll get the menu and notification enhancements that are nice:) If you wanted to go all out check out this thread and the videos – pretty neat stuff.

If you want to change the program location in the 6.5 start menu then use Showaco’s reStart. There’s also a cab to add a 4th column in the start menu.

OK, now let’s talk about that taskbar issue…

The color of your taskbar is set by the theme you have picked (go to Settings – Today and the one picked is your theme). In the simplest terms, you just have to change the image used in the theme. In detailed terms, here’s what to do.

First you need to identify the theme you are using. Whatever the name that appears in Settings – Today will have a file that should be located in Windows with that name and the file extension .tsk so, for example, the Rod Arad Orange theme (from 6.5) is called ron_arad_orange.tsk.  To find out the location of the files the theme relies on all you need to do is unzip the .tsk file, so move it to your PC and change the extension to .zip and unzip it and then open the file _setup.xml in Notepad (yes, if you know how to extract a cab it’s prettier but not necessary).  You can then find the image that is identified as the taskbar and the traybar which will look something like this in Notepad:

HKCU,%reg_path04%,TaskBarThemeImage,0x00000000,Windowsblack_taskbar.png

HKCU,%reg_path03%,SoftKeyBarThemeImage,0x00000000,Windowsblack_softkeybar.png

So that tells me that the file located in windows named black_taskbar.png is responsible for the taskbar image and the file named black_softkeybar.png is responsible for the softkey image (just try it, it’s not as hard as it sounds:))  You are going to replace that file with the image you want to use. So use whatever photo editing software you use (I use Paint.Net cause it’s free:)) and make yourself an image that is 480×52 in size for VGA (Fuze) and 240×26 for QVGA (Tilt) and name the image the same name as your taskbar and then do it again for the softkeybar (so you have a new black_taskbar.png and black_softkeybar.png if you were using the theme I am showing in the example). Ok, move those back to your phone and copy these new files to Windows overwriting the existing files (you should keep a backup of these files unmodified just in case). If you cannot overwrite the files because they are read protected then use an app like Total Commander which will overwrite it. When you do this you should not be in the theme and after you overwrite the file go back to Settings – Today and turn the theme back on and you’re set. The end result is whatever you want in the taskbar including gradients:) Heck you can put your name up there if you want to:) Here’s Dr. Jims’s new task and tray bars and mine (I know, boring brown).

If the theme you are using does not have a custom taskbar/traybar (it can just rely on the registry to set the colors which will be matte) then you can just follow this thread to take a theme and make it entirely your own. And if you replace the taskbar and it comes out with crazy colors it’s just an issue with your .png image. To resolve that just save the image as a jpeg and rename it to .png and it will work fine.

Alright, it’s not like Christmas or anything but I hope it was helpful:)