Just the other day, while writing about the release of TEMA, a custom themes manager for the PS Vita, I talked about how surprised I was that the custom themes scene on the PS Vita had not exploded like it did on the 3DS, with multiple sites and applications for creation, managing and installing custom themes. Lo-and-behold, a new entry to the GekiHEN contest has popped up and it is another application to download and manage your Vita themes by developer Red Squirrel. This one draws its themes from a different website and does not manage themes for VitaShell, however, it features a GUI created with libvita2d. This is great news since I am a firm believer that competition draws the best of people and two theme management applications may actually bring out better development for both applications.

What is Custom Themes Manager?

Custom Themes Manager is an application developed by Red Squirrel and it’s a very complete theme manager featuring a GUI – something not often seen in non-game applications on the PS Vita – which also comes with a bunch of useful features such as: app.db file backup and a reboot option so you don’t have to go through the entire turning off-and-on again process of restarting your PS Vita.

Changelog/Features for Custom Themes Manager v1.0

• GUI with the use of the system font (thx to libvita2d)
• Ability to connect to the online repository of psv.altervista.org directly from the app and browse between hundreds of available Custom Themes
• Ability to view a preview of homescreen and lockscreen directly from the app
• Ability to read all the details available for the Custom Theme in the repository, such as author, version, description and, above all, the tests results
• Ability to show all the Custom Themes available in the online repository as a grid with thumbnails or as a simple list, all at full user’s choice
• Ability to switch between the view modes keeping the selected Custom Theme: this means that if you select a Custom Theme in grid view mode and then switch to the list view mode the Custom Theme selected on the list will be the same you selected in the grid view mode. Of course it works also vice-versa.
• Ability to download all the preview images of the Custom Themes available in the repositories at once, so as to speed up the performance of browsing in future
• Ability to download any Custom Theme in this repository directly from the app
• The program includes an automatic function for extracting ZIP packages of the Custom Themes
• The program performs a check on data extracted from the ZIP package of the Custom Themes, asking the user for a confirmation before proceeding to write data into the database. This way if the downloaded data got corrupted or if occurred errors while extracting the ZIP package, the user can delete the downloaded files and prevent the writing into the database to avoid any corruption.
• Ability to view the title of all the Custom Theme currently installed in the database in a handy list with real-time thumbnail preview of the Custom Theme taken directly from its files currently on the Memory Card
• Ability to know how many space take in total the Custom Themes currently installed on PSVita directly from the home page of the list of Custom Themes installed.
• Ability to view additional information about the Custom Theme which is currently installed on the Memory Card, such as author, path, preview images (these always loaded directly from the Custom Theme’s files) and how many space the Custom Theme takes individually on the Memory Card
• Ability to uninstall any of the installed Custom Themes. The uninstallation procedure includes, in addition to remove the related row from the internal database, even the deletion of all the Custom theme’s files from the Memory Card, all done automatically by the program itself.
• For clarity and ease of use, the list relating to Custom Theme installed will NOT include the Official Themes, since those are easily uninstallable from the PSVita Theme and Backgrounds Settings.
• Ability to view the amount of files in the application’s cache
• Ability to manually clean up the cache of the app through a specific function.
• Ability to manually create a backup of your database (app.db file)
• Ability to manually restore a previously created backup of your database (app.db file)
• Ability to use the left analog stick to quickly scroll the lists.
• Ability to instantly reboot the console directly from the application, so without having to turn off and on manually.
• All the available commands will be always visible to the user on every page thanks to a footer in the page.
• The program will NOT create any folder inside your Memory Card, in fact all the downloaded files will end up in the application’s cache located into savedata0:/, so when you’ll choose to remove the program you’ll delete all the data downloaded automatically, for a complete cleaning.
• Ability to view the changelog for application’s updates directly from the PSVita official app menu.

Download Custom Themes Manager

To get your hands on Red Squirrel‘s Custom Theme Manager, just head on over to the GekiHEN entry page to download and install the VPK file.

Enjoy your new themes!