Creating Themes - Kirocker Music Display

Warning: Kirocker Music Display 4.0 Beta 3 now includes a graphical theme editor. This page is not necessary anymore.
You can read the page on How to Create Custom Frames since frames still have no editor.

Kirocker Music Display 4.0 Beta 1 introduced theme.
See the five featured default themes.
The editor in this version is not finished yet. Here is how to create and modify themes by hand.

File Locations

The default themes are generally installed here: /usr/share/apps/kirocker/themes/.
To create a new theme, copy one of the folders to your home folder here: ~/.kde/share/apps/kirocker/themes/.
Make sure the folder name of your new theme is different of the original folder.
Then, you can restart Kirocker Music Display or Kicker (if you have the applet, do so by using the command "dcop kicker default restart") and edit the colors and frames with the graphical editor.

Background Image(s)

To change the background image, replace the image(s) background.jpg and/or background-wide.jpg.
The first image is for people with a 4/3 screen ratio, and the wide variant is for people with 16/10 wide screens.
If one image is missing, the other is used instead. So if your background image does not suffer from ratio deformation, you can include only one version.
Once you replaced the background image(s), you must restart Kirocker Music Display or Kicker.

Preview

If you changed the background image, duplicate the image file and name it background.preview.jpg or background-wide.preview.jpg.
Edit it in The Gimp to resize it down so that its width is equal to 100 pixels.
For that, use the menu "Image" -> "Scale & Size of the Image..." and enter "100" in the width.
As previously, restart Kirocker Music Display or Kicker after having done this change.

Custom Frames

The default frames are generally installed here: /usr/share/apps/kirocker/frames/.
To create a new frame, copy one of the folders to your home folder here: ~/.kde/share/apps/kirocker/frames/.
Make sure the folder name of your new frame is different of the original folder.
Provide an image named frame.png and edit the file kirocker-frame.config:
The goal of this file is to let the application always position your frame so that the user do not have to enter any padding pixels. When the user choose your frame, for any part of the screen he want, the frame should always be well placed as she meant. For that, Kirocker Music Display need to know the following information:

FixedParts: the image is stretched to fit on screen. You can specify top, left, right and bottom fixed parts that will not be stretched. All four corners will always be represented with the same size, top and bottom corners will be stretched horizontally, and left and right borders will be stretched vertically, while the middle part will be stretched in both direction.
Outside: those numbers are provided for semantically defining what appears on your frame image. Your image can have parts representing a shadow, a surrounding lighting or light glow effet... For instance, if the frame image represents a block with a shadow of 10 pixels at the bottom and the right, put "10" in Right and Bottom. Those Outside parts exclude borders: they are represented in the section bellow.
Border: if your drawing have some borders, put their size here. Generally 0 (no border) or 1 (1 pixel of border), sometimes 2 or more. This information is used to always position the frame in a good way. The padding the user will set when choosing your frame is added to the outside and border aeras. For instance, the cover rectangle is computed so that it is always at the middle of the cover area and the cover reflexion area. The bottom bar always have left, right and bottom borders outside of the screen...
NoDefaultPaddingForBlocks: when the user choose a frame, Kirocker Music Display put decent default padding values so that the user seldomly need to change it. Sometimes, your frame only has a useful outside area, like a shadow or a lightning glow... For areas such as the progressbar, the cover and the lyrics, Kirocker Music Display must not add any padding: all relevant information of the frame is in the outside area, like the shadow. Put this setting to "true" in such cases, and to "false", in other cases (most frames have it to false).

Then, you can restart Kirocker Music Display or Kicker (if you have the applet, do so by using the command "dcop kicker default restart") and use your new frame.
Do not forget to include the frame with the theme if you make it available to other people (see the Share paragraph).

Authoring

Before putting your theme online, considere opening the file kirocker-theme.config of your theme folder in a text editor, and edit the [Author] group.
Put your Name, EMail, URL and CopyrightInformation.
Those information will be used later in the theme About box.

Once you've made a new theme, you can zip the folder and share it by posting its URL in a comment on Kirocker Music Display page.
If it is good it may be included by default in the final version.