Creating a Theme for the iPhone

Reader Ed sent me a message on Facebook asking how to go about creating a theme for the iPod touch/iPhone. Here’s a quick tutorial.

First, an overview of what images you’ll need to create.

As you can see listed above, you’ll need to create Dock.png, StatusBar.png and Wallpaper.png. As well as an Icons folder. It should be noted that none of these are absolutely required, you can easily make a theme without a Wallpaper.png, etc.

Create a folder named after your theme, then store the files listed above in said folder.

More details after the jump.
In the Icons folder you’ll need to create an image for each icon you wish to replace, the naming of the icons is case sensitive. So to replace the icon for iCopter, name an image iCopter.png and so on.

Here are the recommended sizes for the images:
Dock.png – 320 x 91
StatusBar.png – 320 x 20
Wallpaper.png – 320 x 480
app_name.png – 85 x 85

After creating your images, all you have to do is install your theme! The folder for your theme should be dropped into the following directory on your iPhone/iPod touch: var/mobile/Library/SummerBoard/Themes/

Next, open up SMBPrefs and select your theme from the list.

If you create a theme and you’d like to get it listed on Installer.app, send me a ZIP file of your theme and I will add it to the Hijinks Inc. Repo.