For any of you not familiar with Carbide.ui, it’s the tool that enables the creation of themes for Symbian devices (although Nokia have a version for Series 40 theme also). Originally created by Nokia, as part of its Carbide family of tools, Carbide.ui has been donated to the Symbian Foundation and open sourced. This latest version has built in support for Symbian^3 and S60 5th Edition (aka Symbian^1) themes.
Unlike earlier version of Carbide.ui this latest version is not delivered as an installer package. Carbide.ui 3.0 is installed by unzipping the content of the delivered zip file into a folder on your PC (including a Windows 7 PC). Carbide.ui is then run by executing the CarbideUI.bat file found in the root of the folder you unzipped the package to.
Beyond the Symbian^3 support, this new version provides:
- Various performance improvements to importing/exporting themes, copying themes, opening fully skinned themes, creating themes, loading the gallery, bulk clear, launch time, and PC memory use.
- A mechanism for installing and creating theme examples, however, at this stage no examples seem to be available.
- New colour groups.
- Improvements to Frame Animation so new Symbian^3 options for cycle, play, and bounce can be used.
- Links to the open source components in Carbide.ui, accessible through About dialogue.
- Performance improvements to themes deployed on device.
- A fix to issues whereby themes became corrupted after multiple switches in the target platform.
In addition to the plug-in mechanism for examples, Carbide.ui continues to provide a plug-in mechanism for platform and device support. Forum Nokia uses this mechanism to provide plug-ins for the Nokia N97, S60 3rd Edition, Nokia E66, Nokia E71, and Nokia E75. Interestingly there is also a S60 5th Edition plug-in on Forum Nokia too, it seems the one shipped in Carbide.ui is missing some features. Forum Nokia lists these as “Ovi compliant compiler, music player cleanup, preview screen improvements, removal of duplicate elements and defect fixes”. To use this version of the S60 5th Edition plug-in, the one shipped with Carbide.ui 3.0 has to be removed first. This is done from the Window menu by clicking Preferences, then opening the Plug-in management option, selecting the S60 5th Edition plug-in, and clicking Remove.
The new plug-in, and any of the other plug-ins, are then installed by clicking Add and browsing for the downloaded file.
Curiously Carbide.ui is hidden on the Symbian Foundation Product Development Kit (PDT) page, which requires login to access. Worse, if you search the Symbian Foundation for Carbide.ui and even restrict the search to Tools you won’t find it. Not a good situation given that themes are one of the Symbian platform's strengths.
Fortunately you can download Carbide.ui and the plug-in without the need to log into either the Symbian Foundation or Forum Nokia sites:
- Carbide.ui 3.0
- S60 5th Edition plug-in
- Nokia N97 plug-in
- S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 plug-in
- S60 3rd Edition and S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 plug-in
- Nokia E75 plug-in
- Nokia E71 plug-in
- Nokia E66 plug-in
If you have not used Carbide.ui before, a reasonable starting point is the tutorial in the Forum Nokia Design and User Experience Library, just ignore the fact that its based on a rather old version of Carbide.ui, the basics are still the same.