Anyone alter/edit Zumo dashboards?

It seems that the dashboards in Zumos are defined in a dashboard folder and are files with names like GarminNavigon_480x272.dshb. One can open them with notepad and see that the legible sections are perhaps XML.

Any of you guys experimented with editing one of these puppies (after backing up, of course!)?

Seems like one could make the fields smaller or make them go away or whatever, or add another choice.

To clarify what I was thinking, look at this image of a Zumo 350 (which I believe to be substantially the same as other Zumos like the 660, hence why I posted in this forum) that I have added an orange box and numbers to:



As far as I can tell, the orange box constitutes the "dashboard." from L to R the dashboard has 1. last screen button; 2 Arrival time; 3. Speed; 4. Speed Limit; 5. Map Layers button

I would leave numbers 1 & 5 alone, but would want to eliminate #4,
perhaps eliminate or make smaller or more transparent numbers 2 & 3. Garmin allows some menu choices of changing some of the items that are displayed, but nothing to make them smaller or more transparent (so you can still read the part of the map they are covering) and no option to eliminate having a field display entirely.

Since making the above post, I sold my Zumo 350 and got a Nav V. Yet, the Nav V still had the same problem of too much screen area covered by stuff you don't really need. My quest on how to improve that continued, and I am happy to say, bore fruit.

A guy on a German forum has posted up 3 custom dashboards that work for the Nav V and perhaps any other Zumo. Zip files that you download. Extract them and pop them into the dashboards folder on your GPS, and you can try them. They worked for me. They are selected just the same as the ones that came on your device, so you're not messing up anything by trying them.

Find them here: http://www.naviboard.de/vb/showthread.php?t=58341

There are screen caps on the page link above, but the point is that they hide/cover less of that big beautiful map than any of the standard dashboards! 2 of them have transparent field names. Really nice to be able to see more of the map and none of the graphics present in the Garmin dashboards.

Clever!

Al

I'm going to give this a go on my Nav 5. Have always wanted to change the splash screen on startup as well but never managed to do it.

Andy B said:

Have always wanted to change the splash screen on startup...

Click to expand...

Why, pray?

Because I have better ones from my 660.

Job's a goodun'

Interesting. Both my Nuvi and Zumo use 480x272 dashboards rather than 800x480 so the examples offered won't work directly but someone on the German forum posted a link to a how-to to create custom dashboards so here I go. I tried copying a Zumo dash to the Nuvi and it worked fine so I infer that any file of the correct format should work.