Nov

26

Theme and Template Downloads (was ‘A Third-Party Bento Theme’)

Filed Under Site Notes 

PLEASE NOTE: The details about the theme which was related to this post has now been moved to this page.

Earlier today Patrick La Roque sent me the details of a theme he had created for Bento 2. This galvanised me into action and I decided to give up on finding a useful automated way to handle template (and now theme) submissions and it seems easier to simply manage them manually. Therefore the Downloads page has been updated with details about how you can submit your templates and themes and the information I need from you.

Hopefully the library of available downloads will now grow and become a useful resource and I will endeavour to find a more beautiful way to present them.

I decided to keep this post simply because of Patrick’s comment which remains below.

Comments

2 Responses to “Theme and Template Downloads (was ‘A Third-Party Bento Theme’)”

  1. Patrick on November 26th, 2008 7:15 pm

    Thanks for posting about this Simon.
    About the hack thing: I’m not in any way a programmer. But I was immediately intrigued by the custom theme possibilities when I downloaded the Holiday packs. In fact, one of the first thing I did was look inside the package (hey.. it’s a xmas theme right?). I figured if Filemaker could do it, then the mechanism was in place for anyone to try their hand. This appears to be the situation. The fact that the Holiday themes are installed in the user’s app support folder makes it clear that there’s an intention there to allow this in the future.

    What I did was basically retro engineer one of the included themes. There’s no new code. The only new file is the bkg psd that was overwritten with my own. Everything else is set in the attributes.plist file which is an xml file that appears to instruct Bento on how to render each theme. Like a css file for a web page. It wasn’t clear what everything did so I just went with trial and error, examining the various installed themes (which are in the Bento app package), copying and changing things around until I began to understand what controlled what.

    So this isn’t anymore a hack than the Holiday theme. It doesn’t affect the application itself. I just changed attributes in a “legal theme” until I liked the results and saved it as a new file, with a new name. As I said on the forum, this was born out of necessity because I couldn’t settle on anything offered in Bento that worked for me 100% of the time. I knew others out there would probably appreciate it so I decided to share it.

    What’s intriguing to me after this exercise is why? Why isn’t Filemaker providing this on their own? I’ve seen so many posts in the forums about this, about a cleaner theme with more standard, bigger and easier to read fonts… and it’s really pretty easy to do. I did this in two hours without any prior knowledge about the programming behind. Changing a font’s face or size is just a variable. That’s it. Takes 2 seconds to change. If I could understand the strings used for colors (still not sure what to make of that!) I could create a whole bunch of themes in no time at all.

    I’m really hoping this pushes Filemaker into providing us either with more comprehensive customization options, or at the very least a couple of less Powerpoint circa 1997 themes ;-)

    Pat.

  2. Simon on November 26th, 2008 10:08 pm

    I’m sure that FileMaker Inc. do have an intention to add a theme designer because of the presence of the Theme Chooser in Bento 2.

    The template files are also XML based and, if you look at their own templates, you can see that it’s possible to include data so I’m not sure why a template export cannot optionally do this.

    Anyway, thank you for creating the theme and hopefully it will encourage others to do the same and maybe we can build up a theme library here (like the over-due templates library).

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