Theme Installation Feature Requests

[Ivan]

Hi LaunchBox team,

I am a new premium member and I have a few feature requests regarding theme installations. Take this as a feedback from a new user learning how to use LaunchBox/BigBox.

1. Be able to install multiple themes at once, this would help to quickly install multiple themes to test out before deciding which one to use.
2. While download/installing a theme, BigBox does not all you to do anything else at the same time, you have to wait until it is done downloading and installing the chosen theme. It would be great if when waiting for a theme to download and install, you could still use BigBox for other things, like playing games, as the download and installation could occur in the background.
3. Having the ability to pause and cancel a download/installation of a theme would be great. Sometimes a theme is quite large and takes a few minutes and during that time it would be great to be able to pause and cancel the download.
4. It would be helpful if when going through the list of possible themes to install that the installation size is shown in the detail information tab. For instance, I was looking to install a theme that looked nice to me but that was less than 100mb of size when installed. I had difficulty with this and I had to install around 10 themes just to know how much space they each took before deciding on one.

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Sorry for the multiple feature request on the same request but since they are all closely related I put them all together. If it would be better if I separated each request let me know and I will.

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LaunchBox version: 12.6

Windows 10

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Thank you,

Ivan

[Christian]

Hello Ivan, thanks for the report. You have some good suggestions in here. I do want to point out that you can also download themes via our forums and manually place them in your \\LaunchBox\Themes\ folder. This would solve pretty much every issue you have. That being said the Download section themes are vetted as heavily as the ones found in Theme Manager so there could be a few that don’t play as nicely with your set up as they could.

[Ivan]

Hello Christian, you’re welcome.

Thank you for that information, I looked into it and using the website to download themes does solve these issues. There are a few things I did not like about using the website though to search for themes. For instance, some themes, that do not appear in the theme list in BigBox, require multiple steps to install (i.e., extracting specific files to specific folders, manually setting the theme/list view/ wheel view, etc. in BigBox), which is much easier and simpler to setup through the list of available themes in BigBox. It would be great if there were an easier way to install themes from the forum, for instance the theme developer could have all of their theme content in a known/pre-defined folder structure which BigBox could recognize and setup automatically.

Ideally more themes could show up in BigBox, but if not available through there a good setup process for themes from the LaunchBox forums could be:

1. User searches for and finds a desired theme through the LaunchBox forum
2. User downloads the desired theme (which has a pre-defined folder/file structure/naming convention)
3. In LaunchBox/BigBox, the user clicks on a menu option to import a theme
4. A folder explorer window appears where the theme’s main directory folder (or the theme’s zip file) is selected
5. LaunchBox/BigBox asks if the theme should be copied, moved to, or kept in the current folder (similar to the options that are asked when importing ROMs)

6. LaunchBox/BigBox shows an option to install the imported theme (apply as the main theme)

   1. If this option is selected, the theme is then applied (and added to the list of installed themes)
   2. If this option is not selected, the theme is simply imported and added to the list of installed themes

7. Theme import complete

I believe this would make it easier to import themes into LaunchBox/BigBox from the forums. This would also help when uninstalling these themes and making sure everything has been uninstalled correctly.

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I have some more feedback on themes installation in LaunchBox/BigBox:

When downloading a theme, to show in BigBox/LaunchBox the download speed and the estimated time to complete download/installation (the download bar works well to estimate how much has been downloaded but it does not help to estimate the duration left).

When viewing/selecting a theme (Manage Themes > Installed), it would be great to have some indication either on the theme’s name or on the “Apply as Main Theme” that the this theme has already been applied and is currently being used as the Main Theme. One way to do this would be to either change the color of the “Apply as Main Theme” button (i.e., green/light blue color, to symbolize applied) or change the text on it to something like “Applied as Main Theme” or simply “Main Theme”.

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I hope this helps.