[HD2 Windows Mobile 6.5 Themes and Apps] Dunc001:
CHT Home Page Switch Links

OK, so let's get down to it! There are two really cool things at the core of BLUE SK-i, the first of which are the new CHT Page Switch Links. I knew from zaxXx's original Page Switcher widget that it was possible to create something which would let you jump directly to each page on the CHT widget level (Level 1) but wanted to have more flexibility. So I set about creating a completely new set of links to allow you to do just that.

Once you install the Page Switch Links cab and soft reset (the first of many many many you will have to do to get all of this to work!) you will find in the Add Free Link menu a new choice - Home Page Switch Links. So, long press on your home screen wherever you want to place a switch link, select Add Free Link>Home Page Switch Links. IN here you should only be able to see visible the page switch links for the number of portrait screens you have set in CHTE. So if you only have a three screen setup you should only see Page1, Page 2 and Page 3, but if you have a seven page setup you should see 1-7 (you get the idea I'm sure!). Select the link you want and place it as normal. Now when you press on it you should jump directly to your chosen screen.

The page switch links respect your animation setting in CHTE, so if you have animation turned off the switch should be pretty much instant. If you have animation turned on (either setting) then you should briefly see your wallpaper scrolling to your chosen page and then your widget's/links/etc will appear.

In the screenshots the page switch links are the words down the left side of the screen and the home icon in the top left. Well actually that isn't stricly accurate - for BLUE SK-i I wanted to add a little more functionality to the 'sidebar' so I skinned the CHT_email and CHT_messages notification icons to match the page switch icon skin. So the MAIL and MESSAGES icons in the screenshots are actually the notification icons, which means you get the message count alongside and as you know in CHT 2.0 pressing these will take you to the screen with the email/SMS widget on it so it does the same thing as the page switch links. It took a bit of playing about to get the positioning of the text within the 128x128 png right so the message count bubble sat close enough to the text, but also so the text could be exactly lined up with the page switch links when placed (look at the actual icons and you'll realise what I mean - otherwise the bubble would have sat too far out into the screen).

The link cab installs with just basic icons - just the text PAGE 1, PAGE 2, etc - but as with all of the other CHT icons they are just png files stored in \Windows on your phone. They are all named CHT_pageswitch_1.png, and so on. If you want the full BLUE SK-i look I have attached a zip file containing the BLUE SK-i skinned page switch icons, a cab to install them (if you're feeling lazy ;)) and a Photoshop psd file which you can use to add/edit. The home icon is used for CHT_pageswitch_4.png in BLUE SK-i as it is the page I have set in CHTE as the default page (middle one of 7).

To get the full BLUE-SKi setup for the 'sidebar' that you see in the screenshots takes quite a bit of setting up (there are six links on each of the seven screens so 42 links to place in total!) but once you've done it the functionality is great. I did look at trying to edit the CHT_Freelinks.lua to add the ability to 'pin' freelinks just like you can with widgets but there is an awful lot to it, and as you don't want exactly the same links on each page anyway I decided not to do this at the moment.