Sunday, November 4, 2007

iPhone customizations and applications

The first tutorial in this series covered using DockSwap to change your iPhone's Dock background, specifically replacing it with one that matches the Dock on the iPod Touch.
This was fine and dandy until yesterday, when a new version of SummerBoard (an app which allows customization of the iPhone's SpringBoard, or home screen) was released. This new version supports themes and various other settings, but most importantly it appears to prevent DockSwap from doing its job. Thankfully, we can now take advantage of SummerBoard's new theme support to set a custom Dock background, home screen wallpaper, or both.
Tips for Editing Your own DisplayOrder.plist
The plist is in binary format - on a mac you can just double click on this file and edit in the Property List Editor or use plutil -convert xml1 DisplayOrder.plist to convert to text version you can edit anywhere (use plutil -convert binary1 DisplayOrder.plist to convert back to binary plist - see plutil man page). Once you are inside the file, It's pretty self explanatory, but you can basically put any app in any position from 0-11 by changing the displayIdentifier variable. The rest of the icons just get shifted down. If you add more than 16 icons, the list does not scroll, however it has been reported that the SpringBoard.app has the ability to scroll more icons, perhaps just not enabled in this version.
The displayIdentifier property under each item in iconList needs to be a string with a value of something like: 'com.apple.mobilesafari' or 'com.apple.DemoApp', or 'com.apple.fieldtest'
Once your happy with your DisplayOrder.plist file put it into the same folder as your iPhoneInterface app, and type these commands in the iphone terminal:
Upload your Modified DisplayOrder.plist
cd /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/
putfile DisplayOrder.plist
Changing the icons on your main menu
To upload a new icon for the DemoApp:
cd /Applications/DemoApp.app/
putfile icon.png
You can do this for any app, just upload a standard 60x60 png file named icon.png to an app directory.
Skinners get cracking on this!! Lets see if we can create some sweet iPhone icons/skins
source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=671373
iPhone