ScaryBear Software’s
SuperCalendar is an excellent and inexpensive alternative to your PPC’s built-in Calendar. (Visit
http://www.scarybearsoftware.com. As of this writing, the latest version is 3.1.) It has a number of customizable features, one of which is the ability to create custom
icons.
Icons are made available to indicate appointment categories in both month and day views, making it easier to identify appointments at a glance. You can create your own
icons to supplement SuperCalendar’s 61 built-in
icons. Pages 22 and 23 of SuperCalendar’s User Guide (pdf format) gives a brief, but slightly incomplete, description of how
SuperCalendar deals with custom
icons. I want to expand on that information in order to make it both clear and easy for you to make your own
icons.
When
SuperCalendar starts up, it looks in its home directory for a file called “ICONS.BMP”. If it finds such a file, it tries to load it. If the file does not have the correct format, the file is ignored. But if the file has the correct format,
SuperCalendar will use what it finds inside as a collection of one or more custom
icons.
A custom icon for QVGA screen resolutions (320 x 240) is 9 pixels high by 9 pixels wide. But
SuperCalendar automatically makes use of VGA screens (640 x 480) if your device (such as the Axim X50v) has one, in which case each custom icon must be 18 pixels by 18 pixels.
If you want to create more than one custom icon, they must be all together in a single row. So two
icons will comprise one double-wide image of 36 x 18 pixels (for VGA). And three
icons will comprise one triple-wide image of 54 x 18 pixels (for VGA).
I do not know if
SuperCalendar puts a limit to the number of
icons you can have in the
ICONS.BMP file. The size of a single icon is going to be about 1k bytes (at most), and so there would seem to be no practical problem unless you try to stuff the file with thousands upon thousands of
icons.
Creating custom
icons is easy to do with various image editing programs. I’ll discuss that below. After the .BMP file is created, it must be copied to SuperCalendar’s directory on your PPC. With an ActiveSync connection, click on “Explore”, and navigate to SuperCalendar’s directory on the PPC. (For example, “My Pocket PC>Program Files>SuperCalendar”, or “My Pocket PC>Built-in Storage>SuperCalendar”, etc.) Open a Windows Explorer window on your PC, navigate to the folder where you created the
ICONS.BMP file, and simply drag the file from one window to the other.
I will illustrate the process of creating
icons using Microsoft Paint, since that program is already available in any version of Windows on PCs.
Open MS Paint (“Start>Programs>Accessories>Paint”). In Paint, click on “Image>Attributes”. Under “Colors” select “Colors” (i.e., as opposed to “Black and White”). (By the way, you can also create monochrome (black and white)
icons; I’ll have more to say about colors later on.) Under “Units”, select “Pixels”. Now enter appropriate values for “Width” and “Height”: 9 and 9 for QVGA screens, 18 and 18 for VGA screens. This will give you an image which coincides with the size of a single icon in
SuperCalendar. (If you want to add more
icons, you can at any later time come back to this screen and enlarge the image to twice the width, or thrice the width, etc. by entering appropriate multiples of the original value for “Width”.) Click “OK”.
You will notice that the image is quite small. In order to make it easier to work with, magnify the view of it. Unfortunately, Paint can magnify only up to 800%. Fortunately, that is large enough to work with. Click “View>Zoom>Custom”, click on “800%” and then “OK”. Also click “View>Zoom” and make sure that “Show Grid” is checked. (This option will not appear unless the image is zoomed to at least 400%.) The grid is for reference only; it will not appear in the actual image.
Now you can Paint to your heart’s content. Since this is such a very small image, you might want to use the “Pencil” tool almost exclusively; the more sophisticated drawing tools will usually be of little use.
When it comes time to save the file, Paint will give you four different .BMP file types to choose from: “24-bit Bitmap”, “256 Color Bitmap”, “16 Color Bitmap”, and “Monochrome Bitmap”. The details of how these alternatives are encoded into the file are of no concern to us. What is important is that ...
(1) Each of the four types will work with
SuperCalendar.
(2) As you go down the list, the palette of colors from which your image will be recreated becomes smaller and smaller (regardless of which colors you used in creating the original image). For example, with “24-bit Color”, each pixel can be one of millions of different colors, whereas with “Monochrome Bitmap”, all colors, if any, which you used in creating your image will be changed to either black or white.
And (3),
SuperCalendar will understand certain colors to represent pixels which are to be transparent, so that background colors will show through. For example, if your icon happens to be placed on a green background in
SuperCalendar, then transparent pixels in your icon will show as green. For “Monochrome Bitmap”, everything which is saved as white will be interpreted by
SuperCalendar as transparent, and consequently all the black pixels in a “Monochrome Bitmap” icon will appear in
SuperCalendar as black, surrounded by whatever background color is already on the screen. The other .BMP types (i.e., the color types) have this color as transparent: 255,0,255, where these three numbers represent the red, green, and blue components, respectively, of a kind of hot pink color. To see what that means in practice, open Paint, double click any of the colors at the bottom (or else click on “Colors>Edit Colors...”). The “Basic Colors” box appears. Click on “Define Custom Colors >>” to expand the color box. You can type in values for the red, green, and blue components and see what color results. Or if you click on one of the “Basic Colors” in the box at the left, you can see its red, green, and blue components. You will discover that the color defined by 255,0,255 is already one of the “Basic Colors” (the right-most color in the second row), and so whenever you want a transparent pixel in an icon, use that color.
Cheers!
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