I assumed it would come to this since BlackBerry Theme Studio for OS 7.0 is not planned to be released for a few months now. @BlackBerryDev said they were going to post “Full details for Themes on BB7” this month and Garett has followed through with part one of instructions on how to create themes for OS 7.0 using the currently released Theme Studio 6. These instructions are essentially RIM unofficially officially endorsing the method we told you about before that theme developers have been using to create BlackBerry 7 themes using Theme Studio 6.
Will Research In Motion (RIM®) let me modify BlackBerry Theme Studio to create themes for OS 7 devices?
Absolutely! Note that the method proposed in this workaround is by no means easy. It will require considerably more effort to get even basic themes working, but it can be used as a means to create themes until an official BlackBerry Theme Studio is released that supports BlackBerry 7 OS devices. Although these steps are being provided, this method of creating themes is essentially unsupported. Theme creation and stability will entirely be the responsibility of the developer; no bugs will be logged against this method of creating themes.
If Liquid Graphics broke theme support, then how can themes be made?
For the most part, the anatomy of a theme has stayed relatively unchanged between OS releases. With the introduction of BlackBerry 7 OS, several screens now use a completely new mechanism to create the UI, known as Liquid Graphics. Because of this large change, some features and functionalities supported in previous OS themes may be unsupported. This would be a limitation of BlackBerryTheme Studio 6.0 not being aware of how themes are expected in BlackBerry 7 OS. For example, both the phone and home screens previously used SVG for layouts and actions; in BlackBerry 7 OS, the phone screens no longer use SVG at all, while the home screen only uses SVG for layout purposes. All animations on the home screen and the layout of the phone screens are handled by Liquid Graphics.
