(Formerly titled "Knightbox D3.0 & D4.0 CA (Discuss here)")
Here are my third and fourth designs of my Knight Rider inspired WPS. The Beta/D1.0 was buggy, and the design didn't end up looking very good. D3.0 is close to my second design,
but I liked the name "D3" and decided to incorporate that into the name of my WPS.
It goes without saying that I'm a Knight Rider fan (note my nick). Ever since I started to know MP3s, back in the mid '90s, I wanted to make a Knight Rider skin for an MP3 player
(winamp). The idea of having KITT's voicebox "talk" during music playback is just awesome, for me at least. But for some reason I never made such a skin, until about a week ago!
I've been away from the Rockbox seen for about a month. When I came back so many changes had happened! All these new 24bit WPSs got me itching to make my dream skin! Anyway, my
first design was really the first skin/theme/wps I've ever done. So I had to learn the code, and learn how to skin properly all at the same time... That's why it took me forever.
I was dissappointed when I made D1.0, because a lot of things weren't working very well, no one even commented on it and worst of all, it didn't look good. I was trying to be
creative, but I ended up with a bad design that just didn't work.
However, just as I was feeling down about my first design being such a flop, I got an idea for a new design! I knew D1.0 was cluttered with graphics, but that wasn't the reall
problem with it. The problem was that it was "messy". KITT's dash was
all all about being cluttred with buttons, but it looked cool, and it was very neat. So I decided to
make my design closer to KITT's voice box. I also used elements from the dashboard and adapted everything to my WPS's needs. If anyone even remembers the show, the inspiration
comes from the 3rd and 4th season dashboard.
When I started to design D2.0 (the design which then changed into D3.0), I made a lot of thinking about what info was most important for me. D1.0 displayed the year, and album
name, but I really find that unnecessary. I chose to use unifont with this WPS, and I know many people won't like that. However, I have music in English, Arabic, and Chinese in my
collection, and Unifont makes my life a whole lot easier, as I'd never need to change my default page code. Having said that, unifont is 10 pixels high for latin letters, which
leaves me with much less space for text than with other fonts. So this explains why I had to be carefull what to display. Before I finished working on D3.0, album art became
supported as well! So now I didn't want to be out of date, and just release a WPS without album art support! So I started on making ideas for a WPS which displayed album art, and
that's how I came up with D4.0. The good news was that 75X75 pixel album art blended very nicely with my concpet. Sadly though, album art ment there was no space for KITT's
animated voice modulator
However, I quickly thought of adding KITT's scanner towards the bottom instead! The scanner's annimation could of looked much cooler with a "trail" of
dimming lights, but I ran out of BMPs to load into the WPS
But I liked how album art in my WPS became different than in others', because of the album art being in the center.
My design was supposed to be the first to have album art in the center, but "Subliminal Zen" came beat me to it! Oh well, were' still a handfull
Anyway, for more details on the functions and such, please visit:
The Download page
Let me know what you think!
This is the first concept I made.
This is still a concept and a complete mockup, despite having text. The text was actually cut-n-pasted from a screendump. (didn't even install an RB build with 24bit support back then).
This is the Beta of D1. The volume and battery meters were just mockups. I was trying to position the text and get a feeling of where everything would eventually be.
This is what the D1 Beta eventually looked like. Cluttered? Yes. Plus the meters didn't work very well, because they overlapped with the text. I stopped development of this design at this point.
Here are my final products!