14 DAY TRIAL // In anticipation of the upcoming Nokia N8, the first smartphone running Symbian^3, the Symbian Foundation has released a new version of its theme designer application. Carbide.ui Theme Edition 3.0 adds several new features and includes various performance improvements.
The main feature of the latest installment of Carbide.ui is the support added for the creation of Symbian^3 themes, which now comes as the default option. Support for older versions of the Symbian operating system has not been left out and is available via separate plug-ins. The also updated Carbide.ui Theme Edition 3.0 Plug-ins pack adds support for generic S60 3rd and 5th Edition devices, as well as for specific phones such as Nokia N97, E75, E71and E66.
In addition to the previously supported Windows XP and Windows Vista, Carbide.ui Theme Edition 3.0 can now also be run on PCs running Windows 7. Frame Animation has been enhanced with new cycle, play & bounce modes and new color groups were included for the S60 5th Edition platform. The management of example themes has been changed and is now similar to plug-in management. Example themes for all platforms can be added, while unused ones can be removed. Other changes include the addition of links to the open source software used in Carbide.ui accessible via the Help > About dialogue, and a fix for an issue which caused themes to be corrupted when the platform was switched multiple times.
The latest release also comes with a host of performance improvements for import/export operations, copying or opening theme files, creation of new themes, gallery loading and refreshing, bulk clear and application startup time. Also, further optimizations now make the application consume less memory. Besides the improvements to the Carbide.ui software itself, themes created with the application also benefit from performance enhancements.
Users who want to try out the new release can download Carbide.ui Theme Edition 3.0, as well as the updated plug-ins from the Symbian Foundation website.