Honeycomb themed desktop

[Guest tdroza]

A couple of weeks ago I decied to try my first mod by taking a bunch of icons from the Gingerbread Android Emulator and patching them onto my Vega (details here). It all worked surprisingly well, so a few days later when I got my hands on the Honeycomb Emulator I decided to patch in the icons for Home, Menu, Back, Wifi and Battery level (details here). I think these are a big improvement on the stock icons - hope you agree!

Rather than just reproduce the info I've already posted in the threads linked above, I'm going to try to give step-by-step instructions here for how to patch icons into your own ROM, along with the app widgets and wallpaper that I'm using in my homescreens below. Apologies if this ends up being a mammoth post, hopefully you can just dive into the bits that interest you...

Launcher

I'm using LauncherPro Plus with 3 homescreens each with 7 rows and 7 columns - I could easily sqeeze in more but I wanted to maintain a clean look without it getting cluttered. I'm also using Button Savior docked to the left edge of my screen and customized to give access to back, menu and home without needing to use the hardware buttons.

My 3 homescreens:

Primary homescreen

I spend most of my time on this homescreen. It gives me quick access to information so I don't need to jump between separate apps. I've resized most of these widgets (a feature of LaucherProPlus). The left side of this screen is 3 columns wide, and has the standard News and Weather widget, the LauncherPro Facebook widget, and the LauncherPro Calendar widget. The right side, has the Plume widget (which incidentally is a great Twitter client both on the Vega and on a mobile screen). The clock is from Beautiful Widgets (by the same developer as Plume) and uses a theme with the Honeycomb font. Under the clock is a custom power control using Widgetsoid which gives access to toggle Wifi, Brightness and to stop the screen from going into standby (useful if I'm trying to follow a recipe in the kitchen and don't want to keep unlocking the screen with sticky fingers!). The rest of this screen is just shortcuts to frequently used apps, apart from the "Games" link which pops up a panel over the top of the screen with links to all my games.

Left homescreen

LauncherProPlus bookmarks widget filling up most of the screen with previews of each bookmark.

Right homescreen

This is my music & video screen. I have the Cubed music player widget, YouTube and Last.FM widgets and shortcuts to TinyShark (for playing streamed music from Grooveshark) and XBMCRemote (for controling the media centre on my old modded XBox).

Keyboard

I use the excellent Thumb Keyboard which splits the keys into two groups with the numeric keypad in the centre which means you can hold the vega in both hands and type using the thumb on each hand to access each half of the keyboard. It has a few different themes available and allows a different layout to be set for portrait and landscape modes.

Wallpaper

I'm using one of the Honeycomb wallpapers (glowy_hex) but because LauncherPro seems to distort the wallpaper on the Vega, I've resized it to 1200x600 and then increased the canvas to 1200x1024 so that it displays properly. I've applied the same treatment to a couple of the other Honeycomb wallpapers so you can pick your favourite:

Notification bar icons

All the icons for the notification bar are contained in an Android system file called framework-res.apk under the /system/framework/ folder. I started this post by linking to a couple of threads where I posted a modified version of the framework-res file from my own Vega - that's fine if you're running the same ROM as me and you're happy to take all my mods, but if you're running a different ROM or you don't want all of my icons then I've created this zip containing just the icons that I changed so that you can patch them in to your own framework-res file (there's over XX icons that I changed).

It's worth saying again, that you should only do this if you're comfortable at the command-line level, you've taken a backup, and you know how to make things right if anything should go wrong. That said, it's a fairly simple mod, and the only thing that is likely to go wrong is that you need to ensure that you don't end up with a new framework-res that is significantly larger than the stock one because if it's too large, it won't fit in the available space and may fail part way through the copy and the Vega won't boot if you don't have a framework-res.apk.

So, if you're happy to give this a try, you first need to grab your current version of framework-res.apk. To do that you need to connect your Vega to a PC (in USB slave mode) and issue the following command in a dos/shell window on the PC (the adb command is bundled with Paul's MCR ROMs - check out his ROM thread for details):

adb pull /system/framework/framework-res.apk

Now you have a copy of the file, you can open it with your favourite Zip tool (I use 7-Zip), and overwrite any of the icons that you want to change. Most of the icons for the notification bar are in the /res/drawable-mdpi-v4 folder inside the apk. As a starting point, why not get my zip and copy the ones you like into your own framework-res? Then you need to push the modified apk back to your Vega with the following command:

adb push framework-res.apk /system/framework/

I found that after I'd pushed my new file, a few settings were reset to their defaults - for example I had to log back in to my google account to access the marketplace.

Well, I said this might turn into a big post! Hope it was useful!