At the Symbian Smartphone Show held in London, Nokia has announced the availability of Carbide.ui Theme Edition, a PC-based tool that allows the creation of customized user interfaces for mobile phones based on the S60 platform.

The Carbide.ui Theme Edition provides graphic designers with familiar What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) and drag-and-drop functionality, allowing them to customize all S60 user interface elements, from background graphics and navigation bar to colors, sounds and morphing effects.

"Nokia is very pleased to be offering this powerful yet simple mobile user interface design tool to graphic artists and multimedia design professionals, enabling them to explore the creative possibilities in customization of rich and appealing user interfaces for S60-based smartphone devices," said Heikki Koivu, Director, Development Tools, Nokia.

Carbide.ui Theme Edition gives users access to about 1000 customizable drag-and-drop elements to create, edit and view UI theme components, that include wallpapers and backgrounds, icons, pop-up windows and color schemes. After completion, a theme is automatically packaged into an installation file and prepared for Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection, if required.

Other features of the application include support for third-party graphics, audio and content editors, allowing linkage with graphics tools that support bitmap, SVG or Flash Lite editing and with audio editing tools that support multiple sound file formats; multiple screen resolutions support, including 352 x 416 pixels, 240 x 320 pixels and 176 x 208 pixels; and support for importing content in multiple formats including SVG, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SWF and TIFF.

Carbide.ui Theme Edition is available for download free of charge at www.forum.nokia.com/carbide or www.s60.com.