[Wisbar] – Creating notification icons/meters

Since I picked up an O2 XDA Flame,I’ve been tinkering with skins lately on Wisbar – been almost forced to as there aren’t that many VGA themes out there, mainly because the number of VGA devices aren’t as high as the QVGA ones.  

I’ve been customizing themes and posting mainly on the LakeRidge Forums about some of the things I’ve done and gotten a few questions about how to make signal/battery notifications.  There’s a great tutorial on the site (here), but something that people don’t quite get when figuring out how the signal/battery images work is where/how you can tell the dynamic part of the image to end up.  There’s a column on the right of the image that tells Wisbar which palette color you used for the signal strength (or battery/memory usage).  Based on the colors in those single pixels in the right hand column, wisbar drops in the appropriate indicator from your meter.  You can put the pixels anywhere on the image – the right column just tells Wisbar what you’re doing in the image. Make your image look however you want, and then based on the colors you put into the right most column, Wisbar will do the magic for you.

For instance – most signal meters look like this:
(each column is the color of the number)

              *
           * *
        * * *
     * * * *
  * * * * *
0 1 2 3 4 5

Image would look like this:

So the next step could be something like this:
(each row is the color of the number)

5  * * * * *
4   * * * *
3    * * *
2     * *
1      *
0

Image would look like this:

So that’s a simple example.. there’s nothing to stop you from doing something like this:
(here each number is the color)

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 0
5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 0 0
5 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 0 0 0
5 4 3 2 2 2 2 0 0 0 0
5 4 3 2 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
5 4 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 4 3 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 4 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Image would look like this:

Hopefully that gives you a better idea of what you can do.