Developer Blog – The CyanogenMod Theme Engine
“Today we have a guest post from CyanogenMod contributor, Cyanogen Inc. employee, and co-author of the new CM Theme Engine to provide a brief overview of how the Theme Engine works. Please welcome Clark Scheff. – ciwrl”
CyanogenMod makes it easy to quickly customize & change the look of your UI, allowing you to really make your device your device. As someone that loves to tinker, I like to know how things actually work and I wanted to explain how themes actually work in CyanogenMod.
At the most basic level, themes are simply a mechanism to allow resources to be replaced at runtime (as opposed to compilation time – the time when the build is created on the buildbots).
I’ll get into more details about resources, but for now just think of them as the elements which make up the application’s UI. Whenever an application is started, Android loads up the resources associated with that app and the application makes requests for these resources