Hey guys, I finally figured out theming on android. After a long 3 days of screwing around installing different kernels and playing with ADB to no avail, I finally found how to push/pull different apk files on my phone. This is where the fun part begins!
First a little about my background in theming:
I originally started doing system customizations on the iPhone back in the days of "Customize" where you had to open the app to theme one system resource at a time, from the list of user-uploaded content. That got better with Winterboard where it just dynamically themes anything (but keyboards) on the system by replacing files when the system starts. It took a while, but I did end up getting an exhaustive theme over the years for my iPhone. I recently switched to android though because apple has closed all(?) the exploits to allow root access.
Anyway, I'm going to start a new journey to theme the different apps in the system to remove as much of the boring black UI as possible. On first glace it looks like the android UI is very app specific, I haven't found many unified UI elements in the system framework apks. This makes my life a whole lot easier because I can modify each app separately. I'm starting a thread on this, because it looks like it'd be easy to incorporate requests from people or get people working together to make app themes themselves. So far I've only got proof of concept, but obviously that's the hardest part.
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CURRENT TARGET: MusicPlayer.apk (default touchwiz music app)
-------------Just for fun
If anyone is interested, this is what I did for my iPhone 3GS.
Related
Hello to All!
I started some Workshop about Future of Mobile Windows Devices for
- Interface and OS and
- Hardware-Sugegstions
and i want to invite all of you to be Part of this and add your Concepts, Comments and Ideas.
In my Powerpoint-Presentation i worked out some Concept for A 3D-Interface for Explorer, Messaging, Filereader and some Applications-Manager (instead of A Homescreen). Here is the Link, this is about 20MB, because i put in A Lot of Screenshots and Sketches of my Idea.
Within this, you can overview everything on the first View - and there you find Illustrations of an animated graphical 3D-Interface for easy exploring with Thumbnails of everything that is running.
My Idea includes A Concept for making Sessions of what you are doing (opened Programms, Web-Sessions, Multimedia-Sessions, Sessions for Volume, -for Settings, so that you can share whole Devices at once, ...).
Everything is presented to you in horizontal-moving Rings with Icons Rows and Thumbnails of Folders-Content:
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You can preview the Content of A Folder in Background-Icons (Levels) as Thumbnails when you hold your Finger on an Icon,
Menus and Settings and Explorer+ Readers are sorted and put together in 1 Interface - that is my Vision for Windows-Phone 7 Series and later Versions.
-Within the Apps-Manager you watch:
I also want to share with you my Idea of revolutionary Hardware-Features for Windows-Devices and how that could be realized.
Please feel free to let me know your Thoughts for some animated Interface and let's talk about your Suggestions for Future of Windows-Mobile Devices (-Should Win. be more the Way of MP3-Player or of A Tablet-PC?) and please publish Illustrations of your Thoughts and Concepts here, also Comments of the new MS Phone-Concept.
"Let's create Future"
While innovative, I think that looks very over-designed. Not sure that it would be very user friendly... perhaps too flashy.
nice
but i think Microsoft had gone through lots of designs before they chose the new one!
Wow you sure seem to be talented! But not quite sure if you're using it in the right place!
Too many icons
I think that Google, during the ICS design process, decided to optimise all of their icons to XHDPI devices. With all the HD devices coming out that was the wise thing to do but when these icons were scaled down they ended up looking very blurred - almost too anti-aliased.
I decided to re-create these icons to look sharper (by removing all of the anti-aliasing, you don't need it at such a small size) adding small modifications as I go along such as changing the data indicator fonts from Droid Sans to Roboto.
Please bear in mind that this is still unfinished, I still have a lot of icons to make.
Here is a comparison:
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May I add, Roboto looks terrible at small font size.
I'll get around to making an update.zip soon, but meanwhile here is a zip file containing all of the images. If you want any other icons made, just post it's name as a reply.
Dos anybody know how to make a one-size-fits-all update.zip (like Vertumus' universal themes)? It will be a bit tedious to change icons in each and every CM9 nightly, plus bezke's AOKP and Codename Android ports!
I would like to see the compqrison but is the pic deleted???
xethor said:
Dos anybody know how to make a one-size-fits-all update.zip (like Vertumus' universal themes)? It will be a bit tedious to change icons in each and every CM9 nightly, plus bezke's AOKP and Codename Android ports!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"universal" themes are done using VillainTheme (commonly called VRTheme):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1207017
im looking for a developer with some android background who could help to implement some changes regarding per app dpi as explained here.
what this will do is break free what many have come to call "tablet mode" but this time without blowing the phone to bits. we could have the best of both worlds: tablet UI, tablet apps (gapps, settings, youtube, everything tablet HD & related) and normal apps running in their default layouts. the problem is that google created a hole between tiny phones from 2005 and big tablets. all our phones fall in it. it makes no sense that a nexus for instance runs in 1-column layout, its ridiculous actually for such a huge screen. tablet mode, as it is right now, helps, but it forces non-tablet apps into tiny layouts.
now we've had some success with our manual mod and even some dev's jumped in to adapt their apps, nova for instance is now tablet mode ready. but we just need to dig further. without per app dpi this will only be interesting for a small audience. with the setting in check it will probablby blow over and re-define ICS as we know it.
i managed to compile cm9 and im learning how to deal with it but its so much. a simple grep for stuff takes like an hour because its gigabytes of code. it grows way over my head right now. i think i've found A. the position where the treshold for the tablet switch is implemented which could be lowered and B. how to implement individual DPI but there's stuff missing. anyone who's interested to help or lead us in this, please contact me.
ps. what we'll get will look like this:
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with that setting it could be like that on all phones, not just high density ones like nexus.
thanks!
Hey folks!
About on week ago, i was looking make some changes in SGS3 but i didn't see anything interesting. Then i found this thread "Drop UI" and i looks just amazing. The only problems that i saw with it, was the fact that some paid apps are needed to make this work.
Anyway i brought all my those apps and set up my phone, and i must say that it was looking pretty good! So, after that, when i understood when the "Theme" works, i decided to make my own theme, Drop UI is really beautiful but for me it looks a lot like an iPhone.
After took some fonts, look for some images and spend a lot of time in front of Photoshop, i got a theme that i call it "Urban Style". It tried to make it minimalist as possible but i didn't get what i was looking for, instead of it "Urban Style" is a cool theme made just by black-white-grey colours, some "Cities images" and also "Robot" font downloaded just from "Google Design".
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All the images was taken from "Flickr" which has "Common Creative Copyright".
The icons are property of "hunterdsg" and it was downloaded from here
If you like it and would like to use, just follow the tutorial from "DropUI" but using the images from my zip file. I'm also thinking about doing my own tutorial and how to change the paid apps for free ones. All comments are welcome.
The main idea of this kind of theming, came from "SilentRazor", so all the credits is for him.
Urban Style PSD Download
Urban Style ZIP Download
Good one mate. I have succesfully applied your theme with some adjustment of my own. You should post it on mycolorscreen.com and make one with more colourful wallpapers
Sent from my GT-I9300 using xda app-developers app
Thanks, actually i'm working in a new one. Soon i'll post it
OK ive been seeing a commercial for an lg phone that u can do multiple things at the same time ie: record video and text at the same time without leaving recording screen is this possible on our phone? Would it be a mod and would our device not be able to handle it?
sent from my spell ridden galaxy nexus
Not happening. Its a feature the skin overlay adds. Would require porting the whole skin just like the Samsung version.
I'm confused by skin overlay what do you mean and the other party about porting.. I'm no developer but certain things can be pulled and ported to go on a phone, isn't it an apk that does it or system ui or Idk....lol
sent from my spell ridden galaxy nexus
Its not Legos. You can't just pull a system app dependent on system frameworks from one device and install it to another.
063_XOBX said:
Its not Legos. You can't just pull a system app dependent on system frameworks from one device and install it to another.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No I get that but there have been many things pulled, edited and then done that way Motorola launcher with its widgets for example
sent from my spell ridden galaxy nexus
You're not talking about a widget here. You're talking about system framework and things much deeper in the system. If it was that simple it would be done already.
I was also referring to the actual razor max launcher has well and had far as framework the ROM I'm on has all kind of changes in ui ... I'm going to all them if it's possible thanks though
sent from my spell ridden galaxy nexus
You're not listening so I give up.
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Hi. You make samsung multiwindow work for my nexus? yes!
good day.