zerolight

I discovered Customize2 the other day and have been messing with it. It lets you build more complex themes than merely using SummerBoard alone, though it does interact with SummerBoard. SSH and DropCopy are your friends for this sort of stuff.

I’ve spent a lot time tweaking a theme of my own. It’s called zerotheme. I did it all on the iTouch itself via a terminal app I’ve installed. I’ve tried using the Customize Web App to build and share it, but after 4 failed attempts (zerolight – zerolightV4) it’s clear that the web-app is currently horribly broken. Any new theme you create ends up as empty folders when shared and downloaded by others – as 28 people told me! Still it works perfectly when built on my iTouch.

It’s got a variation of the dock I use on my iMac, the one I replaced the ugly Leopard one with. It’s got a bunch of icons from David Lanham and Louie Mantia, some nice wallpaper, and a few nice icons I made myself. I also replaced the WiFi indicator with a 5 bar indicator which gives a more accurate indication of the signal strength, and there’s nifty little a blue battery indicator too on the status bar. I made a tweak to the badge, and updated the battery charging screen, then gave it a Stüssy based lock screen… you know I love Stüssy.

edit: If you want it, and since the Customize Web App is f*cked, you can download it for a manual install here.

edit: I’ve migrated it to firmware 2.0 and submitted it to a Cydia repository. In the space of a few hours it’s been downloaded over 1100 times. EEK.

I’ve avoided this little gem of an app for ages. It’s available to jailbroken iPod Touches and iPhones. I never got the pun until recently – Apple call their launcher SpringBoard, SummerBoard enhances it. Doh. Most of the themes I’d seen were pretty poor, with garish backgrounds and ugly icons. However there’s a few good ones, mostly by Louie Mantia often based on icons by David Lanham.

I decided to give it a go yesterday, and whilst I was at it, I mildly tweaked the two themes I liked best Agua (by David Lanham and Louie Mantia) and Buuf2 (by Louie Mantia). The results are below, alongside the original Apple SpringBoard theme. I kinda like it for now. Click the images to enlarge. Photoset here.

I’ve made a few minor updates to my site, Apple-ifying it somewhat with the addition of iPod Touch / iPhone style calendar icons dating each post. I also wrote a new Joomla module, an icon based menu, which I’ve also Apple-ified. And finally, there’s some minor tweaking to the look of the modules on the right. All very minor stuff, but it was fun.

At last, and iPod worth upgrading to. For those of us that can’t get their mits on an iPhone because we have company mobiles, the latest iPod Touch is the object of desire… besides a dozen or so guitars. It’s finally been upgraded to a useful 32GB of storage space, and is the sexiest PDA/MP3 player on the planet. Gimme Gimme.

I tweaked the 2D Leopard Dock which I thought looked ropey, to make a smokey version of Tiger’s dock. I’ll live with it for a little while to see if I prefer it to my smokey 3D dock.