Developing Home Screens?

[Guest Dave Abrey]

I've read a few topics around the forum, and I'm getting a bit confused :-(. I want to have a go at developing a new home screen layout, and I'm after some guidance about how to go about it. So I'd be grateful if some one could point me in the right direction :).

1) Is there a visual tool that I can use for making the scrren? Or do I need to code the xml using notepad or similar, and then check them out using the emulator in the SDK?

2) If I download the SDK to use the emulator, do I need the embedded visual tools (or whatever it's called) if I only want to use the emulator to check homescreens? I'm not interested in doing any development beyond changing the home screen, so I'd like to avoid a 300+ mb download if I can avoid it :wink:.

[Guest Bazz]

Easiest way is just to manually code XML and then copy it across. It's veeerry slow, but simple. I haven't used the emulator to view screens so can't really help on that front

[Guest Colonel Hogan]

...or if you just want to make some simple home screen, check this softwares:

Theme Generator

SPV Home and theme machine

(I use wordpad for xml... :wink: )

[Guest Dave Abrey]

Thanks for the replies :). I had a go at modifying one fo the existing ones (using notepad), and it's not too difficult.

What text format should I use to save the files in? Using the default format of both Notepad and Wordpad, the file wouldn't work (problems with acented characters), however, when I changed to unicode it seemed to work OK. I noticed the 'unicode big endian' (!!!) seemed to produce a smaller file than the standard unicode, but both seemed to work. Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks,

Dave.