Themes: Specifying the UI Look and Feel

Tizen provides powerful theme features you can use to easily change your applications' UI look and feel. A theme is a collection of visual identities, which provide the graphical appearance of applications. A theme comprises a layout, shapes, fonts, and colors for the UI components.

The Tizen platform provides a default theme for UI components implemented based on the Tizen UX design concept (AIR – light and simple). To change the current look and feel, you can replace the default theme with a customized theme package.

The Edje library used by Elementary provides themes. You can also use Edje to create your own objects to modify the application appearance with a unique GUI. The UI components are customizable so that each application can have its own customized theme to overlay the default theme.

Edje supports separation between layout and logic. While it is possible to implement both GUI and logic in the C code, a loose coupling of GUI and logic is more convenient when you want to revise, add, or delete application UI components. In EFL, the GUI is handled by Edje, while application logic is handled in the C code.

Edje was designed as a theme layer for moving the look, feel, and animation of objects into separate data files loaded at runtime. Using a plain text EDC file you can create your application's layout without writing a single line of code. EFL can even change the theme of application at runtime without restarting the application.