In my previous post I talked about how to make the background of your U10 a Flash movie, so I thought I would post the source for my first background, a random generating background. It looks fairly plain on the desktop, but when you add in all of the menu items from the device, it looks a little more interesting. :)

In addition to adding the circle elements, I am altering the alpha level of the non-highlighted elements of the menu. To make the menu work with any background color, the text elements are set at about 30% opacity. The Flash background I’ve been working on is a bit bold color-wise and the menu items are getting lost. By bumping the _alpha of /all/currentMenu up to 300%, you can make the text opaque.

Prior to doing a little more introspection I had previously been changing the alpha of the root, but that affects other UI elements like the translucent black overlay for system notifications like volume adjustments and connectivity. By more narrowly targeting the alpha setting, I can boost just menu text and arrows.

Another interesting thing that you can see when you start doing dynamic backgrounds is that the SWF is reloaded several times. If the backlight turns off, the background will redraw when the light comes back on. The same holds for when you change from portrait to landscape or launch and exit a game. The strange thing is that right before it redraws, you still see the old state. It isn’t that the background was ever unloaded; it was just reloaded.