Theme Development
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FrontMotion Login Themes are SWF files created using any of the available Flash tools. We recommend Macromedia Flash MX or Flash MX 2004 to create your Themes. The SWF file should be saved as version Flash 6 or above to support video and for compatibility with international versions of Windows.

Themes are directory created under \Program Files\FrontMotion Login\Themes. The name shown in the theme chooser is also the name of it's directory.


Simple Themes
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A good starting place for creating a theme is to customize the Luna theme. It does not contain any state transition animation and only contains a simple clock animation that displays the date and time. The states are also in the recommended order which maximizes object reuse.

Please refer to the Theme Structure documentation for full detail on States, FSCommands and Events.


Advanced Themes
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To create more complex themes see BubbleOS and CommunicationOS as examples. These themes contain numerous animation effects and advanced techniques. Specifically, transitions are controlled using the variable _root.CurrentState.

The transition effects during system start up is implemented inside the StartupAni symbol which spans FMStartup and FMWelcome. This symbol includes animation for both states and contains a few simple statement to detect which state should be played. Notice that the beginning of the animation is a simple copy of FMInitialize and the end is a copy of FMIdle.

The ClosingAni symbol spans most of the states and contains outgoing/closing animations. The content of these animation is usually a static copy of the original state. At the start of each state, the script in the main time line plays the correct label by checking CurrentState (which now contains the old state).


Themes with International Fonts
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Sometimes symbols or unusual fonts are used to make themes more interesting. When creating themes that uses characters outside of the ANSI character set (e.g. Japanese, Cyrillic, etc.). Please embed the font into the SWF, otherwise they will probably not show correctly on other systems.

Also, Flash MX has a limitation with international character inputs so we recommend using Microsoft's AppLocale program to launch Flash MX on English systems.