Themes make a comeback with CM12

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Themes make a comeback with CM12

If you’ve been waiting patiently for your favourite theme or themers to get to work on CyanogenMod 12, you haven’t got long to wait now. Earlier this morning the team merged ~13,000+ lines of changes to CM12 for themes. We’ve tracked down the actual information from the developer and we’ll share it with everyone below. We apologize in advance for the copy and paste skills used:

CyanogenMod Theme Engine Alpha

There are a few things I would like to point out.  Clark Scheff

1.  Since Lollipop switched from holo to material styles, most, if not all, themes designed for CM11 won’t look too great when applied on CM12, unless an app is still using the holo styles.  Keep that in mind as you play around with your existing themes.

2.  This one is extremely important to themers.  Some themes may have bad .9.png images and if that is the case the theme will no longer work.  We were a bit lenient with this situation in CM11 but due to major changes in the way aapt works we can no longer afford to be lenient.  If your theme no longer shows up or it won’t install, check logcat to see why.  Most likely it will be a bad or malformed ninepatch.  (see attached screenshot of what you’ll see if a bad theme is on your device)

3.  Another one for theme designers.  Currently you cannot have a theme that is designed for CM12 and CM11.  This is an issue with CM11 not knowing what to do with assets such as vector drawables.  I’m looking into a possible patch for CM11 but there will be no guarantee that a user will take the update and they may still experience issues with your theme so please keep this in mind.  The play store will allow you to submit an apk that is targeting CM12 instead of CM11 and it will provide the end user with the correct version.

4.  And another for you theme designers ;).  When designing a theme for CM12, you will need to make sure you specify a targetSdkVersion=”21″ in your <uses-sdk> tag.  This will let the system know that it was designed for CM12 and not CM11.  We will be updating the template in the coming days so you can use that as a reference.

5.  Play around and let us know what you think!

edit
Forgot to mention that we dropped support for themes based on the T-Mobile theme engine.

 

 

If you’ve followed DroidHorizon for long, you’ll remember we had a section on the site where we showcased our favourite themes and themers with links to purchase from the Play Store. That was a long time ago (possibly back in the CM9 days.) A lot has changed since then with the Cyanogen Mod team and design in general. If you do use CM12 and maybe you’ve become bored with the stock look, this will be great news, if you don’t happen to use CM as an after-market ROM. Hey, it’s no problem, we’re just sharing a little bit of information. For me personally, I’m looking forward to seeing it added and what the great designers can bring. Even icon themes implemented system wide or a change of font would make loads of difference and add something unique to our screens again.

Chief Editor of DroidHorizon. I own a few different devices at the minute and enjoy writing reviews and sharing what I think is cool. You can often find me playing Playstation 4 or sprawled across the couch with headphones on (maybe with a nice beer or gin & tonic in-hand)

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