Some time ago, I started an Account for PiZero Symbian Design on Facebook.

But it was like a personal account, and not a true facebook "page".So, I made a new "website page" in Facebook in the last days, and the older account will be soon deleted.

If you are already a member in facebook, sign in and register to the page of PiZero Symbian Design. If you are not registered, i suggest to register to Facebook to be connected to hundreds of other Pizero.net fans on facebook.

Click on the button below to go to the Official Pizero.net Facebook page, and "become a fan"!

Here we are, with the fourth Poll of The Perfect Theme Project!

Just to remember, "The Perfect Theme Project is  the project to make a theme based on the suggestions and votes from PiZero.net Users"

The Second Poll decided the subject ot the theme: Abstract, as this subject was the winning among other with 65% an more than 750 votes.

The Third Poll counted over 3000 votes, and nearly half of them decided that the background has to be Black!

But, as I can’t do a completely black Theme, I’m asking you, today, what should be the main complimentary colour of the theme: For example, the colour of  higlights, clocks, tabs, selections, and other elements that are normally part of a Symbian Theme:

Possible choices today are:   Silver or Platinum, Red, Blue, Light blue, Pink, Other Metallic colours (for example, Bronze, Copper, Titanium), Soft colours (Like Sand, Plum, Beige, or other undersaturated colour)  or Multiple colors (For Example, Like in "Psycho")

Make your choice now!

The Third Perfect Theme Project Poll is starting today!

Just to remember, The Perfect Theme Project is  the project to make a theme based on the suggestions and votes from PiZero.net Users.

The First Poll about the "Perfect Theme Project" of last week, is telling that over 94% of you seem to like the idea of a theme built on user’s wishes and votes.

The Second Poll, which ends today, decided the subject ot the theme: Abstract, as this subject was the winning among other with 65% an more than 750 votes.

So, Today’s poll is asking your preferred colour for the background main colour: choices are Black; White, Grey (including beige), Red, Blue, Light blue, Green, Pink, Yellow, Orange, Violet or purple, Brown (and all variatons).

Make your choice now!

Today, I decided to try, and so here it is: The Perfect Theme – by PiZero.

But where it is, that "Perfect" Theme?

Well, it is still not ready for release, and not even in developement.

In fact, the "Perfect Theme" – maybe a little pretentious name, but i didn’t know how to call it otherwise – is a theme that will be made following user’s ideas and votes.

The main idea is to ask a question to my readers, each week, and make a poll to decide the answer, that will determine the main aspects of the Perfect Theme.

Week after week, the theme will be built follwing reader’s votes, the poll results will determine the winning feature. For example, I will be asking the background color, the subject, highlights, clock, icons.

I know it will take months to have the theme ready, but I hope it will be, for the majoriity of you, the best possible theme for Symbian.

Also, people will be able to suggest features and give ideas with their comments, and if I like them, I could implement them in the release.

What do you think, do you like the idea?

Finally, after weeks of work, everything seems to be ok, and so here is the new layout of PiZero Design.

Many of you will notice slight changes in the graphics and layout.

The hopepage has now totally new feel.

In the top area, a new header,   and 2 navigation bars:

• The first brings to useful areas of the website (pages)
• The second allows to read directly each blog category, plus there is a compatibility tool, and a brief theme installation tutorial.

In the main area, you will find 3 major categories:

• PiZero News – Everything that is related to this blog
• Symbian News – Sometimes, I like to share the most interesting news with my readers
• Then, the Symbian Themes:

1. In the First area, you will find the 5 most recent themes that I ma
2. In the lower area, there are the 5 most downloaded themes since this website creation. I tought it can be useful to new visitors that are looking for "most popular" products.

On the sidebar, the first square can be used to suscribe to email feed, meaning that when the website is updated, you will receive an email with feed.

There is also a new featured video, showing at a glance my most known works. Try it!.

Last, but not least, I completely remade the Theme Gallery, now showing nearly all my new and old works. The new gallery is now more stylish and easy. 

Once the gallery is open, just click on the theme thumbnail and you will have a shadowbox showing fullsize screenshot. On top of the screenshot, you can download that theme directly, without going trough each post. Cool, isn’t it?

The only themes that are not included in theme gallery are the newer ones, that can be accessed easily using the blog posts.

Finally, I hope that this new website will make an easier and more pleasant navigation. I hope everything is ok, if you find a bug report it using the new contact form (right button on the navigation bar).

If you want, please leave a comment with your thoughts about this new layout.

PiZero

Starting from now, and probably for the next 2/3 days, I will be performing some maintainance on the website. This is due to a major change in the website layout and graphics. The new website graphic will be online soon, with a brand new look! So, please note that there could be some layout issues in the next days, until the new website is online. Sorry for the inconveniance!

Finally I managed to edit, repack, and replace all the themes packages of this blog.

It took so many hours of work, but I think it’s worth the pain to disassemble, repack, re-sign and upload all the themes from may 2007 to today.

All the themes are now signed with a certificate that will expire on 2028.  I Think it’s enough

Also, all the themes now show a little pop-up during installation, telling this website’s name. I hope this will help preventing abuses on free themes.

So, everybody can now download and install the older themes, without having to change the date back.

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Yeah. I signed up for Facebook, and made an account named “PiZero Symbian Design”. So, if you are registered to Facebook, you can now add PiZero Symbian Design as a friend.   Come on, I’d like to reach 1000 friends at least!  

Link: PiZero Symbian Design @ Facebook

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EDIT (2):

This evening I received an email from Handango. They thank me for “bringing attention” to the copyright violations of the user named “SymbianShow”. They explaied me that Handango is not a big corporation owned by Microsoft, as I wrote previously on my post, but a relatively small company ( I read somewhere 70 Employees). Many people last week where travelling for business, and they apologize for the delay in solving the issue. The developer “SymbianShow” was banned and all his (my) themes removed from the Marketplace.

Finally, an happy end, at least this time. Sorry for my mistake about Handango property ( I remember I read somewhere that their company was held by Microsoft, but it seems this is wrong).

Thank you to all my friends for the dozens of email received, and so many posts on weblogs supporting me.

Hi to all, friends, This is a “special post”. No theme publishing today. Instead, I’d like to share with you some thoughts about something that is really putting me down.

First, I’d like to explain the first part of the title. Honesty exists, yes.

Before running this blog I was unsure about real honesty, for people you don’t know (not the kind of thing like “i buy, and I don’t steal. Because i’m honest”, but real honesty, like “I can get this free, but I prefer to buy, to thank the author).

I’ve had, during the last year, great experiences with real honest people. Like all the people that sent me donations for the free themes. First of all, thank you to all the donators, and to all the people that purchased my Premium Themes. Then a special example come from a guy named Stefano, he sent me donations during all the year.  And he also bought all the premium themes, including older and newer ones. A big thanks also to Mr JackH., for his sincere appreciations and suggestion about my themes. I sent him for free some premium themes, but he decided however to buy them. A big thanks also for the guys that reported me violations on copyright, and forums hosting illegally my premium themes.

But unfortunately, not all the people act like this.

The problem is that I discovered, some days ago, that somebody is selling some of my FREE THEMES,  the ones you get weekly free from here, on HANDANGO, for 10$ each.

Handango(.)com  is the biggest marketplace for mobile software in the world.

Of course this is a violation of my license terms, but also a violation of US, International and Italian civil and criminal law. (intellectal property violated for commercial purposes).

Of course this thing  made my furious.

I immediately alerted Handango, to remove the fraudolent themes for sale, and to have the NAME of that person.
I received a quick reply from Handango after some hours. The guy told me that my email was turned to the copyright manager, to quickly solve the issue.

I really hope to see that problem solved rapidly, but however I will have to wait until next week.

Fortunately now the stolen themes have been removed from Handango.

I don’t like the idea that he is making money on my work, but  the worst thing, that is really making me furious, is that is really SCAMMING people by selling freeware, and I would be very pleased to give him a some worries.

But even if I managed to solve this problem, this stuff really makes me unsure about the future of thememaking. I’m really losing the happiness and the enjoyment of making themes. Now I just make themes, and then I must spend my time checking that my themes are not been sold somewhere, or published without my name etc.

Long time ago, I found people selling my free themes and Babi’s Themes on Ebay.

Another time, I found that an Handango customer, after buying my Premium Themes, was publishing them on a forum.   Just today,  I got an email from a user, telling that somebody was uploading my free themes on a rapidshare-like service, and got payed 15$ for every 1000 download.

I also found, some months ago, a russian site that modified and renamed every sis file, to delete the author’s name and to put a popup with the website address instead.

And another time, I found a chinese website where there was a thememaker making “clones” of my premium themes. Chinese fake premium themes! (this was instead very funny…)

I really don’t understand why people act like this. Making something that is free is great because you have much feedback about users, many traffic, many comments and many downloads. But unfortunately there is also some people that only want to destroy or use your work for their personal purposes. So don’t blame me, if in a remote future (and I hope NEVER!), I will give up making themes, or if my themes will be no longer free.

That’s all folks, thanks for reading this very long post.

1.000.000 Visitors from  175 Countries of the World

4.000.000 of Pageviews

900.000 Themes downloaded from PiZero.net

over 2.000.000 Themes downloaded counting other sites (I will never know exactly!)

THANK YOU!!!

The service will be back and fully functional tomorrow.

After seeing a post at SiMo‘s blog I decided to take a look to the Disqus comment system, that is rising very fast on thousands of blogs platforms, like WordPress, Blogger and Typepad.

After looking carefully to it, I decided to implement it here, because I usually get many comments under my post, and I hope that an improved coomunity system will bring always more commenting here. Using Disqus, comments become very similar to forum threads, users can quote & reply to other people’s comments, an they can also rate the comments thay read.

“With Disqus, your readers aren’t just leaving comments — they’re participants in a discussion that you’ve started”

With Disqus, users can use Avatars, and create and mantain their identity on all the blog that are using Disqus, and discussion becomes more like a web 2.0 social experience.

There will also be an official community page about PiZero Symbian Design. You can access it following this link:

http://pizero.disqus.com

Do you like the idea? Drop a comment here to try the new features

Some Users reported, in the last days, that they can not install my older themes, the first themes that were published on this blog. They seem to get an “expired certificate” error that prevents from installing the themes.

The problem is well-known and refer to the expiration of the certificates that I used to sign the *sis files last year. The Certificates that I got from SymbianSigned were valid over an year only. But there’s a solution.

For the newer themes, this problem don’t exist, because they were made using a 20-Year certiciate, that will last until 2027!

For the older ones, the first thing to do, if you wish to install such themes, is to set the date on you phone back to May 2007. Then install the desired theme, and come back to today’s date. This trick solves the problem, but I know that this is not very practical to do.

I’m thinking about a definitive solution, but this will require some time do to. I should update all the packages on the server, extracting the *sis files, resign them and then re-uploading them all. I think I will start to do it on the next weekend, but more than one week will be required to do all the work.

An update will be given when the work’s finished.

Here’s a link to the older themes archives (from May to August 2007).

May 2007 Themes

June 2007 Themes

July 2007 Themes

August 2007 Themes

This Blog first post was made exactly one year ago, on May 8 of 2007. I was just starting to make themes for symbian, and my style was in fact very different from today.

I started making themes on Carbide and had the idea to open this blog, after seeing the great success of the masters’ blog P@sco with Jaspp.net and Babi of Babinokia.

I’ve very happy of this first year of my blog. I’d like to expand it by adding new features and posting more, because making high quality themes takes time, and I cannot post a new theme each day.

So, maybe in future I will add more posts regarding the Nokia and Symbian world, with news, articles, software and more. I’d like to add some reviews of Nokia phones, but unfortunately I don’t know how to test all the new devices. I usually don’t change phone every month (it’s a matter of budget, in fact i’d love to do so!!!)

You can find Here the first theme that was posted in this post.If you want to install it, do it, but I advice you, it’s not a masterpiece

Unfortunately The older themes are packed with an old certificate that is today expired. So, so install those themes you will have to set the date on your phone to may 2007, install and then return to today date. I’m currently working to fix this problem trying to re-sign all those themes. It will take some tim to do it.

PiZero

]]> http://www.pizero.net/archives/325/feed 25 http://www.pizero.net/archives/309 http://www.pizero.net/archives/309#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:49:13 +0000 PiZero http://www.pizero.net/?p=309 I’ve started making themes about an year ago, using the online tool at ownskin.com. After some time, I thought those themes were not enough, and I downloaded Nokia’s Carbude.ui, the official S60 professional Thememaking tool.

During May 2007, I had the idea to open my own blog to publish my own themes. After some months I was very happy with the results, many people visited my blog and downloaded my themes.

Some days ago, after nearly one year, I got my 500.000 visit. Thank to you all for making my blog so succesful.

To celebrate this event, I opened a new section of this blog. It’s the Premium Themes section.

here you can find the premium themes that I’m currently selling on the Handango mobile store.

Take a look at the premium themes section, and if you like it, you can buy them with a -20% discount using this promo code during the checkout: A164C739

Buying more than one theme is very convenient, as you get discount in the shopping cart.

Buying one or more themes will help me developing more and more this website.

GO TO THE PREMIUM THEMES STORE