How-to: Cube Edits/mods/creation

[windorabug]

Thanks, but unfortunatly I don't seem to have that program on my phone

[agentmikeyd]

is vista cube 2.0 working on the new Official Sprint ROM???

[Musicman247]

Calling all users: Does any one have access to the following program from the original Sprint HTC Touch ROM?

htcStartMenu.exe

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[neodd70]

Hi all. This is my first post but I have been reading a lot of the posts to learn how to make the mod's to my Touch and I think I have a pretty good grasp on how it all works. I have made a few changes to the registry and it has worked fine but I have a question about the MediaHubMini set of controls. I have the Sprint version of the touch and as everyone knows Sprint has to go and mess up something that is already working fine so when I pull up the MediaHubMini I don't have the media player controls when music is playing. I changed the registry so instead of it going to the Sprint Music Store it pulls up the Audio Manager which works fine but how do I get the player controls to pull up at the bottom? Does it have anything to do with the WMPinfo registry file of the MediaHubMini folder? There are 3 entries "available" "duration" and "position" each with a value of 0. Can someone let me know how to set this back the way HTC had it before sprint got to it? TIA

[abc11435]

A user asked me to post some instructions on how to edit some cube arts from another thread. So instead of going off topic there I decided to redirect the post to this thread. Musicman did a great job explaining the technical side of things, I thought I might give some suggestion to the graphical side. See attached for my current 6 sided cube:

1) Go here to get the bmp to brn converter:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...93#post1687493

2) get your icons at http://www.iconshock.com/web-icons.php
3) Then use any graphic software to scale the image to 105x105 or smaller depending on how big you want the graphic to be. You should use something that can handle layering, like Gimp or Photoshop. Windows Paint will NOT work.
4) enlarge the canvas size to 119x105 (keeping the image intact), center the image on canvas
5) put anything else (text, additional graphics) on its own layers
6) Here is the tricky part. Because brn/bmp cannot handle transparency, you have to cut up the background to exact coordinate and paste to the back of your icons. To make matters worse, Windows will overlay all 6 of your images on top of another background image AL_Bkgd.brn, spacing each icons a couple pixels apart. So you have to make sure EVERYTHING line up perfectly. If any has a better way of doing this I'm all ears.

Once you have a 240(W) x 320(H) (or slightly bigger) background art ready, make a slight transparent by adjusting the opacity, this will be your AL_Bkgd.brn. Then cut it up as follow:

1 2
3 4
5 6

Icon 1 - 0,0 to 119, 105
Icon 2 - 240, 0 to 121, 105
Icon 3 - 0,107 to 119, 212
Icon 4 - 240, 107 to 121, 212
Icon 5 - 0,214 to 119, 319
Icon 6 - 240, 214 to 121, 319

The space in between the icons is because TouchFlo will leave a couple pixels between the 6 icons so that the AL_Bkgd.brn will show up a little (how annoying).

EDIT: According to Musicman, if you make the icons fill up the entire screen, the background won't show up at all. So that means:

Icon 1 - 0,0 to 120, 107
Icon 2 - 240, 0 to 121, 107
Icon 3 - 0,107 to 120, 214
Icon 4 - 240, 107 to 121, 214
Icon 5 - 0,214 to 120, 320
Icon 6 - 240, 214 to 121, 320

(I have not tested this out)

6) Paste whatever you cut up to the back of each of your corresponding icon.
7) export all your images to bmp. You should now have 6 icons and 1 background images.
8 ) convert to brn
9) copy to Windows/ folder, configure Cube to use those images. You may or may not want to make a seperate icons for when they are hightlighted.

Chances are you might be off by a pixel or 2. In that case go back and adjust the icons that are off. Also I have not taken the time to make the animated images which display when the cube rotates. But basically you need to scale the images along the Y axis. But they appear so fast anyway most ppl don't really notice. If I ever get around to do it I will post it here as well.

All in all this was more painful than it really should be. Again if anyone has a better way to do this I'm all ears.

[Musicman247]

Just to even further clarify (great job explaining, btw! ), this statement:

Originally Posted by abc11435

The space in between the icons is because TouchFlo will leave a couple pixels between the 6 icons so that the AL_Bkgd.brn will show up a little (how annoying).

is not entirely correct. TouchFlo will draw the icons any size you want, as long as the image is that size. So if you don't want the background to show up, simply fill all of the screen space (240w x 320h) with your icons.

ie if you want 4 icons on each cloumn, make each icon 120w x 80h. That will fill the screen and not have the background show through.

Other than that, great write-up!

[abc11435]

Originally Posted by Musicman247

Just to even further clarify (great job explaining, btw! ), this statement:



is not entirely correct. TouchFlo will draw the icons any size you want, as long as the image is that size. So if you don't want the background to show up, simply fill all of the screen space (240w x 320h) with your icons.

ie if you want 4 icons on each cloumn, make each icon 120w x 80h. That will fill the screen and not have the background show through.

Other than that, great write-up!

Wow if that is true, then it sure does make it a lot easier. I will try that. Thanks!

[neodd70]

Sorry I just saw the info I needed a few pages back. I've looked at so many different posts they all seemed to blend together and I couldn't remember where I saw it. Another question though which I didn't see in this post is how do I disable the mediahubmini and still have 4 sides to my cube. I noticed that the mediahubmini registry values are different then the APLauncher values (there are no size or position values). Is this something that just needs to be added to make the mediahubmini function like an APLauncher or is there another way?

[Musicman247]

Originally Posted by neodd70

Sorry I just saw the info I needed a few pages back. I've looked at so many different posts they all seemed to blend together and I couldn't remember where I saw it. Another question though which I didn't see in this post is how do I disable the mediahubmini and still have 4 sides to my cube. I noticed that the mediahubmini registry values are different then the APLauncher values (there are no size or position values). Is this something that just needs to be added to make the mediahubmini function like an APLauncher or is there another way?

To disable anything, you just need to remove its reference.

All the program's references are in:
HKLM\Software\HTC\Biotouch\Biotouch\App(whatever number it is)

Set up another APLauncher (see "Adding Sides To the Cube" in the How to) and instead of adding another App# value, change the one for MediHubMini.

[neodd70]

Thanks Musicman247 just to clarify do I change all of the values and folders for the mediahubmini to match the APLauncher because I noticed that there where no settings in the mediahubmini for adjusting the size of the buttons or the location. So if I wanted a 4 side cube 1 quick dial and 3 APLaunchers would I have the APLauncher, CustAPLauncher and mediahubmini all with the same settings except the path and location of .brn file. Also I assume that I need to add a binary value to the 2nd Biotouch folder for the order of the .brn files for animation (07 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 0A C8 C9 CA CB 13 14 15 16 17 01) of coarse it would be different then this one. Thanks again