See this topic for instructions.
Instructions for skins designers
Here is a guide to explain how to create your own skins for Smart Keyboard (Pro)! These skins must be written in a new file format called "OpenSkin".
You will need:
- The latest version of Smart Keyboard Pro (or at least SKP 3.4.0)
- Optionally, get the Android SDK containing the Android emulator.
- Some artistic skills
Download and extract the Android sample skin to see how is structured an OpenSkin file.
A skin archive contains the following files:
- skin.xml
- drawable/*.png
- drawable-hdpi/*.png
The images are located in either drawable or drawable-hdpi directories. All the images in drawable will be used on phones with MDPI screen resolution (160 dpi), which is the historical resolution of the first Android phones. A skin must contain images for MDPI phones to ensure compatibility. The images in drawable-hdpi are of course used on HDPI phones (240 dpi). It is not mandatory to provide HDPI images, but it is strongly recommended, otherwise the MDPI images will be scaled on the fly when loaded on a HDPI phone, and the skin will look blurry (not to say ugly).
The sample Android skin contains images for both MDPI and HDPI screens.
Now, an important thing to know is that most images for the skin (all the background images, actually) are in the ".9.png" format (see the sample skin), which is the "NinePatch" format developed specifically for Android by Google. A NinePatch image is a png with additional information to make the image stretchable easily. To create a NinePatch image, you can use the draw9patch tool contained in the Android SDK. You can also create such images without draw9patch; you just need to add a 1-pixel transparent border around your image, and put black pixels where needed to define the stretch zones of the image, as done by draw9patch.
Now, let's see how you can create your own skin:
- Extract the sample skin.
- Replace the images in drawable and drawable-hdpi by whatever you want
- Edit the skin.xml file, change the skin name (keep the "1.0" version, it's not the version of the skin, it's the version of the schema!) and put the correct file names for images. Note that you must not put "drawable" or "drawable-hdpi" in the image file name, as the correct directory is computed at run time when the skin is loaded.
In the sample skin there is no image for the background, but a color gradient. If you want to use a background image, just remove the color-top and color-bottom and put an image tag instead as explained in the comment. - Use your favorite archive tool to create a zip containing the skin.xml and drawable* directories. You can use any name for the zip file, but it's better to find a unique name to avoid conflicts (same thing for the skin name you defined in the skin.xml)
- Upload the skin file to your SD card in "skins" directory
- Go to Smart Keyboard skin settings, and test your skin
- You should test your skin on at least a MDPI and a HDPI phone. If you can't do this, use the Android emulator included in the SDK. This is always a good idea when creating skins that will be uploaded online, as more people will be able to enjoy the skin.
- Share your skin on this forum (there may be a web repository in the future)