Tip: Making your theme size smaller so it runs faster

[BBThemes]

So i figured that as we all make themes with quite high graphical content, the filesize of your theme starts going up and up, some are even going over 3/4mb in filesize. this provides a problem both with capacity on the device for that size, and sometimes smoothness of the theme too, so i figured id share my top way to keep that filesize as low as possible using software you already have on your PC.

So all you need to do this, is BlackBerry Composer, its part of the Theme Suite download so it`ll already be on your pc.

so take the image you`ve made, say a signal meter, or banner it really doesnt matter what the image is, and look at the filesize, for my example i made a signal meter and it was 54.9Kb

step 1) create a new project in composer
step 2) hit file>import and locate and import your image. repeat as many times as you need to import all your images, you dont need to worry about moving them from where they import either.
step 3) hit file>export>svg and export to a new folder.
step 4) browse to that folder on your pc and you`ll find a folder labelled `images` and inside that folder is all your images you just exported.

you`ll find when you hover over an image that the filesize (in most cases) is drastically smaller, how much smaller? well that 54.9Kb signal meter i made was just 1.19Kb!!

then just use that image in your theme and hey presto some filesize saved

now im not saying it`ll work for every image, icons banners and meters seem to react best but by hovering over the image you can see the filesize then see if its reduced. this doesnt compomise the quality of the image at all either, it`ll just help to keep your themes nice and lightweight.

so give it a try and see how it fares for you, as for a few seconds effort you can really reduce that size but keep all that quality.

[mrtolles]

Reducing image size is a great tip. I never realized composer compresses images for you.

However, you may want to try this tip left by mastamoon on this POST stating to use a free program called PNGGauntlet. You drag and drop your PNG files in to the window and it auto-compresses them. I use it on all images in my theme, even those exported from Composer and it reduces the size even more then composer did. Sometimes images are are not able to be compressed smaller by PNGGauntlet, but the program recognizes that and only overwrites images it can compress.