Apr

25

Your Special Category – Bento Issues

Filed Under Bento Issues, Editorial | 17 Comments

This category will only have this one post – these instructions. It is for all the odds and ends that you, the Bento User, would like to have tied up. Leave a comment about anything. Ask for help, describe your wishes and problems in detail. Emphasis on Detail. I do reserve the right to summarize.

This does not replace the private Contact Form. But anything you want to share with other Bento Users should go here.

If an issue comes up that fits into another category I will create a post over there where we can expand on it even further.

Have fun and don’t hesitate to discuss any Bento issue you like.

Apr

24

Customizing Themes – Logo Display

Filed Under Tutorials | 1 Comment

Several people expressed interest in displaying a company logo in the background of a Bento form. That’s another relatively easy theme customization.

Again, go back to the Resources folder in the package content of our test theme Starfield Casual in the sample ThemePack file. There you’ll find the picture file Background.png. That file makes up the main background of the theme. That particular picture is a customized photo I used myself as a test. You just have to replace that Background picture with your logo picture (in the theme you want to customize). But that’s not all…

You need to know that Bento tiles the background picture – similar to the tiling option for the computer desktop wallpaper. So if you just want one logo displayed (like a letterhead) then, first of all, you have to make your picture big enough to fill the whole Bento screen so it can’t be tiled. You could place your logo at the left top, for example, and then expand the rest of your picture background to the right and down.

Finally, to make your logo look as close as possible to the original picture, several background parameters in the .plist file have to be adjusted, which is a bit tricky. The test file (Starfield Casual) demonstrates the following changes.

First you should normally turn off the transparency of the title banner. If you don’t, your background picture continues as a mirror image in the title banner, as used in the Swimming Pool theme for effect, and in some other themes as well.
Find the <key> named bannerFill. The <string> below gradientColorBottom and gradientColorTop has four parameters. Change the fourth parameter of each to “1.” The first three make up the actual color.

Next I would change the <real> parameter of the first two keys in the .plist file: backGroundBrightness to “-0” and backGroundContrast to “1.” To be safe you could also change backgroundHueAngle (0) and backgroundSaturation (1).
Finally change backgroundTileScale to “1” to make sure your logo doesn’t look skewed.

That’s it. And please, give me feedback, ask questions. Have fun with your new logo!