How to put flash Menus on K750

[Magicnet2]

Normally K750 and w800 and such, don't support flash menus. But it is possible to make a normal menu, that looks and acts like the flash menus. The trick is that you either create a new or edit an existing menu in such a way, that you will create only the "selected" versions of the icons. You dont need to bother with the unselected icons, cause you wont be able to see them. Those selected icons, have to be as big as the screen excluding the upper and bottom bars, so in my case (K750 or W800) it should be 170 x 140. You will have to chose if you want to have the menu rotating, or as tabs, or anything. The trick is to draw the little and the big "icons" on the same picture, that you will use later as the icon (so you won't have one picture as the bacground and separate little pictures for selected and unselected icons. You will have 12 big pictures. And on all of them there will be the background, all the little unselected icons and one selected icon.) So first you make one basic picture which will represent the background. You can even use animated giffs for the backgroun for the icons, so you will have an animated looping moving desktop. My example will be a cirkular menu looking from above, so you see the whole circle. On the background image you have to draw all the other icons there are on the desctop and organize them corresponding to the menu you have now. On every picture there will be all of the little icons drawn and one of them will have to be highlighted, so youll have to create 12 similar pictures, all of them with all of the little "icons" drawn in the same places, but on every picture a different little "icon" will be selected. You have to organiye the so, that by moving to one or the other side, you will hit the right picture for the right menu. In my case it would have to be as follows: I would have to start by "messaging" (thats the first menu selected) starting at the bottom of the circle and going right on the joystick = counterclockwise on the circle: then "Media Player", "File Manager", "Contacts", "Radio", "Calls", "Organizer", "Settings", "Play Now", "Net Services", "Games" and last "Camera". So in the circle, the camera will be just left from Messaging and
the Media Player will be just right from Messaging. When you have finished makeing all twelve of the big "Icons", then edit the menu.ml. The easiest way, when you dont know how to is to take an allready modded one and rename your pictures to correspond to the paths stated in the menu.ml. But, you'll have to delete the lines that refer to the unselected icons. I'll copy a little passage out of two menu.ml-s One using ordinary layout(1) with the unselected icons paths and one using circular layout(2) without the unselected icon paths:

1:
<!-- Desktop Element 1 using DESKTOP_HOOK_1 -->
<element id="PlayNow" replace="next">
<label type="name" textid="DIL_PRE_PLAY_LINK_TXT"/>
<icon pos="unselected" source="internal">PREPLAY_DESKTOP_ICN</icon>
<icon pos="selected" source="internal">PREPLAY_DESKTOP_SELECTED_ICN</icon>
<link type="internal"/>
</element>

2:
<!-- Desktop Element 1 using DESKTOP_HOOK_1 -->
<element id="PlayNow" replace="next">
<label type="name" textid="DIL_PRE_PLAY_LINK_TXT"/>
<icon pos="selected" source="file">icon1_selected.gif</icon>
<link type="internal"/>
</element>

As you can see, in the first one, where there is the ordinary menu layout, you have the "Selected" and "unselected" icon paths. But in the second one, there you dont have the "unselected" icon paths as you don't use unselected Icons. And you can see in the first part, there are still the original names for the icons: PREPLAY_DESKTOP_ICN. In the second allready the changed names:icon1_selected.gif . So you have to change the names in the menu.ml to those names of the pictures. When you have the pictures and the menu.ml ready, connect to the phone and copy all the pictures and the menu.ml to the file TPA/PRESET/SYSTEM/MENU. I will not give a tutor on how to flash the CID36 and CID49 phones. You can find them either here somewhere or on esato or se-nse.

Here some example pictures. (These are the icons , to which the paths are set)





Another thing. If you want to make them nice smoothly scrolling, you could acomplish it, but would take even more time using photoshop and a gif animator.
OK, imagine: you have a ready big icon picture, like those above. Go to Photoshop, make a blank, lets say black picture of the same size as your icon picture. Copy the whole icon picture and paste it into the black one, but so, that u move it up nearly "out of the black picture" so you will see the black and only a little stripe of the icon on the upper side of the black one. Save it as lets say 1.jpg. then move the icon pict a little bit down, so you see a bit more of it and save as 2. Then move it again more down, and save and so on, till the icon picture "slides" completely down to cover the whole black picture. Everytime u move the icon over the black, move it for the same amount of pixels, so the final "movement in the animated pict would be fluent. So you will probably have now like 10 - 12 "frames of an animated gif. Put it in a giff animator as frames, set the timing between the frames to really low times, so the slide will be quick and leave it to run only one time. NOT LOOPING. Because, if you would stay on the menu longer, it would keep sliding down for ever and would look idiotic. I chose the movement up - down, cause from left to right, or reverse, would look good only if you would scroll the oposite way and not the same. Example: icons slide from left to right. You scroll from right to left, so the icons "comes" from the left. OK. But you scroll right, and the icon should come from right and comes again from left. BAD. So up down or down up is at least a bit better. And then make or use a theme, that has the background in the same colour as the blank that is getting covered by the icon pictures, so it wont slide covering a black background in a yellow theme :-)

Takes time, but you get a good feeling you have a menu nobody else has and that you made it yourself and it works... :-)