A closer look at the new c500/Orange plugin

[Guest zeta101]

Hi, I realise there are a few threads on this (and the new homescreen) but this one is more about how the plugin works. I've noticed there isn't any discussion about the new plugin (no doubt because the likes of Midnight are busy figuring out exactly how it works and are planning on writing an excellent article on it hehe) but I can't wait for that :)

Has anyone played with the plugin yet? I'm slightly disappointed because it doesnt seem very cusomtisable. The xml seems very bland :D

So far I've managed to change the weblinks at the bottom, you can add or take away from the list. Also as i suspected the background of the plugin is transparent, and you can play with the "alpha" of it, it defaults to 70% transparent, but I've reduced that a bit for a better effect. There is also a strange bit in the header that says: Flag1 = "1". The strange thing is that it doesnt seem to do anything obvious and doesnt mind if you change it (I've tried 0,2 and something high like 20)...the homescreen still loads fine and looks and acts the same.

As far as these "Opt" things go, you can't really shuffle them around much. If you try and move a whole block, say the SMS block (denoted by Opt_2_x) and say place it before the Call history block (denoted by Opt_1_x) it doesnt change the homscreen at all, it still functions the same. If you try and mix Opts, for example do something like this:

Opt_0_0 ="Contacts"

Opt_0_1 ="Add a Contact"

Opt_2_1 ="Unread SMS"

to try and make you own menu structure then the homescreen settings will fail to load the homescreen for selection (so it really doesnt like you doing that :P).

So other than playing around with the colours a bit you cant do much :D you cant change the icons from the xml (biggest problem being they will always have bits of them highlighted in orange when under selection, so it will mess up your colour schemes). I'm hoping I've missed something here, and it is infact more customisable that it looks.

Ps, does anyone know what the "notify" plugin is right at the beginnning, even before the "iconbar" plugin? I've never seen this on my WM2002 homescreens:

pps, it says at the top of the homescreen that its made by "Abaxia" at http://www.abaxia.com/ so it wasn't done by orange, they got an external company to make it.

[Guest midnight]

dont look at me for figuring it out, i dont have a c500, however, i have *cough* had the homescreen xml + plugin etc for quite a while and to be honest, it doesnt look like theres a hell of a lot you can do with this plugin really, seems to have a lot of hardcoded stuff + embedded images for the popout backgrounds etc. But then, i never bothered with the E200 plugin either :)

[Guest neilfenstein]

You can change the of the menus/background, time and date etc but if you change the iconbar to transparent and Alphablend to 0 there is a darkened effect on the back ground image. This is obviously part of the plugin but it would be nice to find out the parameter or control name to change it!