Mini-Review:
Changing Your PalmOS Colour Theme
By
Bob Deskin
One of
the nice things about PalmOS 5 is that
there’s a Pref to allow you to change the
colour theme. Bored with the standard? Go for Yellow, Orange, Purple, or one of 31 different
schemes. Prior to PalmOS 5 or if one of the 31 doesn’t
appeal to you, there were other programs to let you change things to your
liking. Recently new versions of Colorize and Khroma
were released, so I decided to take a look and compare them side by side.
I
should mention that both of these excellent programs are freeware. There is
another program that let’s you change colour themes named SprayPaint. However it is shareware, costs $8.95, and
in a brief look, I did not see any functionality that wasn’t already
available in the other programs. That’s not to say that SprayPaint isn’t a good program, but if the
others are free, well…
Colorize
is from Chris Antos of HandyShopper
fame. He just released version 1.4a that fixes an abort on exporting a
theme to a memo on a T3. The interface is basic, but handles all the theme
requirements.
 
Colorize
has 29 built-in themes. The main form lets you set the colour depth, import
from or export to a Memo, and edit the current theme. Each of the tabs on
the edit form gives you access to a group of entities to colour. Tapping on
a colour box brings up the PalmOS palette where
you can pick a colour or use the RGB sliders.
Once
you’re done editing, and say OK, the theme is put into use. If you
really get messed up, simply cancel out of the edit.
Once
you’re satisfied, don’t forget to save your theme to a memo.
Then it’s easily available for import.
Khroma is from Bela
Hackman. Version 2.3.2 just came out. Khroma has more options and more built-in themes than
Colorize but at the cost of a bit more complexity.
Khroma comes with 66 themes and uses
categories. As well as letting you import from and export to a Memo, Khroma also lets you save your theme right in the
built-in themes. Khroma has a series of menus for
the various options such as starting a new theme,
saving a theme, importing and exporting a theme, and deleting themes. You
can also customize various startup options and
specify which type of colour picker you want to use. Khroma
has its own version plus the PalmOS palette. Or
you can go directly to the RGB sliders.
Khroma also lets you auto-pick. Like
having the theme of the day. There’s also an option to adjust icon
transparency. I did not try this at all.
Khroma also comes with a small
program, Khroma QuickChange, that just
lets you pick a theme and change the colour depth. Very much like the
built-in Pref. So if all you want to do is pick a new theme from the
built-in themes or those you’ve saved, this smaller program is all
you need.
Colorize
and Khroma save the activated colour theme as a
Saved Preference, so it survives a soft reset. If you use Uninstall
Manager, you’ll see the preference as ‘psys’
ID:25. Don’t delete it or you’ll be
back to the default colour scheme.
Both of
these programs do their job well. They make it easy to play with the colour
themes until you find something that pleases you. They both let you import
and export. Khroma has more options and therefore
more menu entries. Colorize has just what it needs to do the basic job.
Which you choose will depend on your needs and which interface you prefer.
Either way you can’t go wrong.
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