making your own nokia theme

All the trouble started when i wanted to gift my friend a nokia theme for his birthday,i was impressed seeing how much he loved himself,so tought that he will be happy to have a theme featuring himself on his mobile(that he loved more than himself ;-P),so i set out to make it before his bithday

i first started by downloading softwares that allow to create our own themes for nokia phones using S40(its an operating system on his phones,nokia bosts that its the wolds most used operatingsystem for mobile devices), i used one of them,it did not impress me for it only allowed to change various backgrounds appearing in the theme and i seriously wanted even icons to be under my control,i was stuck there

one day i had a bolt from the blue "whats the extension of a theme file?",
(any data that a computer(a mobile,in this case) uses to interpret or process must be in the form of a file,so this damn theme must also be a file.as anybody reading this blog is certainly aware that a mobilphone processes or interprets many types of data like songs,images,games,......ect the operating system of the phone differentiates all this data from each other by the exension of the file name,and the each type of file has data arranged in a specific format which will help the computer in understanding whats present in that file)
the extension of the nokia theme file is .nth
so i googled ".nth file format"

the answer i found dissapointd me a lot,for the task which seemed to be an adventure was reduced to a mere cut and paste now
a nokia theme is mearly a compressed zipped archive disguised as file with with extension .nth and every thing that a theme does is written in a single program called themedescriptor.xml
well dont worry about that xml part,i myself dont know what it is and have created(edited,technically speaking) many themes so far

now lets get to work,being aware that the we are mearly working with a mere zip file which pretends to be something else(like many of us),we have to first change the extension of it to .zip to see what is actually present in it,it can be accomlished by just renaming it as "mytheme.zip" if the original theme was "mytheme.nth"

a few friends of mine had problems doing this because in many computers with windows the extensin is not visible to avoid newbies messing up with it,we can change the settings by following this procedure on any computer with windows

goto tools click folder options then click view uncheck hide extensions of known file types

now we have ended up with a normal zip file,any thing in it can be extracted by using a simple software like winzip

to make a simple theme just extract the files from the zip file and replace the different images in the file with the same name and then add those files to zipped archive using same software you used to unzip those

now be careful at this juncture i found people getting stuck here,select  zip as archive format not rar(see the screen shot once),dont worry about the compression method,any thing will do,but as the theme must ideally occupy as much less space as possible,so its a good practice to select the best compression method possible

click ok,u will have a zip file again,rename its extension as .nth and ur theme is ready
an other word of caution,make double sure that the file themedescriptor.xml and other files are directly seen when u open the archive,i.e they must not be present in any folder or sub folder

look at the icons

im giving a few photographs here,which will give u a certain idea of different effects that can be created,last photo shows that ive replaced my own photographs for different icons

and believe me,ive not written or edited single progam to accomplish this,all this has been done by just replacing different images in the extrected file by my own images with same name

now coming to the xml file,why dont u open and see it once,i bet u can suerly understand it,there is no need to know xml for that,ill try to eplain that in my next post but plz dont wait for me


thanx for reading this article,please leave me a comment if u like it or even if u dont
bye