Nokia's new Carbide.ui tool lets graphics & creative pros customize S60 smartphone UI

[Nikos Kartalis]

Nokia today announced the availability of Carbide.ui Theme Edition, a powerful and easy to use PC-based tool that lets designers and creative professionals build customized user interfaces for mobile devices based on S60, the world's leading smartphone platform with millions of devices currently in the marketplace.

The latest addition to Nokia's branded Carbide family of mobile development tools, announced here today at The Smartphone Show, Carbide.ui Theme Edition provides graphics professionals and creative designers familiar WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop functionality, plus seamless interplay with leading graphics creation tools for customization of the look and feel of the latest S60-based smartphones. Individuals with no prior experience in mobile user-interface design or knowledge of coding language can use the Carbide.ui Theme editor to customize all S60 UI elements, from background graphics and navigation bar to colors, sounds and morphing effects.

Carbide.ui Theme Edition provides creative design professionals with the powerful tools they need to meet business and mobile operator requirements for building rich and appealing S60 mobile UI designs for a variety of commercial uses, including branding, affinity and customer loyalty campaigns. Carbide.ui Theme dramatically accelerates the time from project inception to market, enabling designers to produce competitive mobile UI products for clients in a matter of weeks, not months, both on budget and on time.

Using Carbide.ui Theme Edition, designers and creative professionals can rely on nearly 1,000 customizable drag-and-drop elements to create, easily edit and view UI theme components, including wallpaper and backgrounds, application icons, pop-up windows and color schemes.

Once a UI theme has been created, Carbide.ui Theme Edition automatically packages it into an installation file and prepares it for Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection, if required, after which it will be ready for deployment to devices.

"Nokia is very pleased to be offering this powerful yet simple mobile UI design tool to graphic artists and multimedia design professionals, enabling them to explore the creative possibilities in customization of rich and appealing user interfaces for S60-based smartphone devices," said Heikki Koivu, Director, Development Tools, Nokia. "Using Carbide.ui Theme Edition, individuals with no prior mobile design experience or knowledge of coding languages will now be able to direct their creativity toward creating unique user experiences for the millions of consumers using smartphone devices around the globe."

In addition to Carbide.ui Theme Edition's drag-and-drop functionality, WYSIWYG environment, support for all customizable UI theme components and full S60 platform support, other key features of Theme Edition include:

• Support for third-party graphics, audio and content editors, allowing linkage with graphics tools that support bitmap, SVG or Flash Lite editing and with audio editing tools that support multiple sound file formats;
• Multiple screen resolutions support, including 352 x 416 pixels, 240 x 320 pixels, and 176 x 208 pixels; and,
• Content import in multiple formats, including SVG, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SWF and TIFF, allowing design artists to use their favorite creative suite.

Nokia's Carbide brand of developer tools provides a single identity for all Nokia's mobile developer tool offerings. The new Carbide.ui Theme Edition joins other recently announced members of Nokia's tiered family of Carbide developer tools products, including Carbide.j for Java developers, Carbide.vs for C++ developers using Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Carbide.c++ family of tools for the Symbian ecosystem -- Carbide.c++ Express, Carbide.c++ Developer and Carbide.c++ Professional.

Nokia has provided a clear and consistent migration path to Carbide.ui Theme Edition as the direct successor of its S60 Theme Studio tool for UI design. Future versions of Carbide.ui Theme Edition will support the features of successive S60 platform releases.