App Theming

[matthesrieke]

Hi Rahul,

since it looks like that creating a high contrast design is not as simple as we thought regarding to Johannes, I suggest to adjust scopes a bit here.

We discussed the ability to adjust themes for the app. The idea is to have the possibility to switch to a different theme with a simple adjustment of one parameter. There might be situations that we want to change the corporate design for a specialized target audience (e.g. a city-wide project, or for a company).

It would be great to have the ability to just "switch" the theme at compile time, not on the fly. So one distribution of the app cannot change its theme. I hope I am clear enough at this point :-)

We were wondering if there is already such thing available for android. A quick google search lead me to this article. I did not read through all of it, but I was missing the ability to adjust image resources (e.g. the logo) via that mechanism. Could you do some research and play around with this, once you have the other features at a mature level?

@nuest feel free to add anything I might have missed.

[nuest]

Imho: if it is easier to use an existing method and change the theme at runtime, then that would also be OK. We can probably "pre-select" a specific theme and disable the selection menu if we want to ship alternative versions of the app, at the price of shipping unused image files of course.

I would also extend a bit on "do some research": What this means for us is that @rahul690973 googles and browses documentation and creates a very comprehensive list of links of everything that is to know about themes on Android. Rahul also writes a short summary of these links (1-2 paragraphs) and highlights/ranks the latest and/or best practices to achieve multiple themes either at runtime or compile-time.

[rahulrj]

Okay. I will do it. But is it really that different organizations would ask for a different app theme. Means you are talking about several themes apart from our "dark contrasting theme"?

[nuest]

Yes, that would be many different themes.

[carsonfarmer]

@rahul690973 just to clarify, I'm guessing the ultimate goal is to make it possible to have 'custom' EnviroCar apps for different organizations that might contribute data to the project. For instance, there might be a 'Gotham City' theme (which would have to be designed by someone) that we could turn on for Gotham City users.

[rahulrj]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kkQrNdzmMyV9C3oYyUelGkpC7SrI8I4utG5LyYKkBqk/edit?usp=sharing

[nuest]

@rahul690973 Please allow users who are not logged in to at least make comments on the document, so we can... comment. Thanks!

[rahulrj]

The link is open to all ? Isnt it @nuest ?

[nuest]

No - I still get "view only" message. Maybe it takes a few minutes to propagate...

[rahulrj]

You can try it now. Updated the link. Anyone can comment now.

[nuest]

Thanks for this first researchLet's wait a bit for Carson to comment and then you can maybe extend where we have questions and add some information about customization that is not related to the theme.

[carsonfarmer]

@rahul690973 I have added some comments to the file, please check them out and address where appropriate.

[matthesrieke]

I also went through the documentation. thanks for creating this. I left one or two comments regarding different images across themes.

[carsonfarmer]

Thanks @matthesrieke. @rahul690973 any further clarification required on these items?

[matthesrieke]

I feel this is a good starting point. We meant this task as a research one, so I guess trying things out actually should have a low priority (= if there is time left before pencils down).

[hafenkran]

UI has already been revised