Application Theming in Storyboard
There are several different approaches that you can take for dynamically changing the theme of your Storyboard application.
* You can manage a list of variables that will be affected by the theme and then map these variables to appropriate values based on the theme being used. The values could come from an external configuration file (like a CSV or JSON or Lua file) that allows you to organize your assets in a way that makes sense for your deployment.
* You can leave the resources along in the Design project and work 'outside' of Storyboard to shift the assets around at their origin. This would involve for example using a symbolic link in the filesystem to point at different themed images. Once you change the filesystem then you can inform Storyboard to drop its cached resource references and then reload the new content from the redirected filesystem location.
The benefit of the first approach is that it can expand to more than just image references by changing the values of any variables within Storyboard. The benefit of the second approach is that you don't necessarily need to have all themed content mapped to variables in order for it to change. Customers often use a mix of both techniques because when you change a theme generally it isn't just imagery that needs to change it may be other color sets as well.
Here are two projects that demonstrate this type of theming. The filesystem project will only work on a Linux/MacOS style system where symbolic links to the filesystem are supported. If you select the round area in the lower right corner on the main screen it will flip the theming on the UI from light to dark.
Thanks,
-Jamie
Comments
Hi Jamie,
Do you think the link to the sample projects could be updated? The current link appears to be dead.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the heads up. The link has been updated.
-Jamie
Please sign in to leave a comment.