ThemeBuilder: Get Your Mashup On
by Eric March on April 3, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I have to admit that whenever I look over the many Summerboard themes available, I am sometimes struck by particular elements that I love about them. Much of the time the entire theme is gorgeous, but sometimes it may not be my cuppa except for certain bits. This one has nice icons, that one has great wallpaper, another does a mighty fine dock, and so on. I could certainly take the best bits from two or more themes, shove ‘em together and call it a theme, but that’s a bit of a pain in the tuchus, having to SSH in, extract the themes, copy over the elements that I want, then SSH them back as a new theme.
Fortunately, ThemeBuilder has turned up to make life a great deal easier on that front. ThemeBuilder runs right on your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows you to grab wallpapers, icons, docks and status bars from any currently installed theme and shove them into your own newly created hybrid theme without ever having to look at an SSH or FTP session. You can also build your own theme from its built-in library of wallpapers, docks, status bars and icons. There aren’t a whole lot of such icons built-in (and for some apps, like Stocks or Weather, nothing that really fits), but there are enough to get you started if that’s the direction you want to head in. I’m sure more icons will be available in future versions, possibly with the ability to add more. There is also only one built-in dock, and there are no status bar images, but there is a decent range of wallpapers.
ThemeBuilder is available on the BigBoss repository. Remember that their source address has changed, so either update your Community Sources or change the repo address to http://thebigboss.org/repo.xml
Screenshots (click to enlarge)
(Source: Just Another iPhone Blog)
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Posted in Application Related, Theme Related
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I would like to say that this looks all well and good but the new customize 2.0 that I am currently beta testing, works on a similar sort of method of picking your favourite bits but does it so much better with being able to be able to update the the themes there and then in customize and make multipull backups of the alsorts of different combinations that you happen to fall in love with. Still in its BETA stages and is already sounds great and they are still ready to add, so much more to come!
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I’m definitely looking forward to the new Customize. There looks to be a lot of new features that are really going to improve the customization experience. I guess we will have to see how useful ThemeBuilder will be when the new Customize is released.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
I like the concept, but it is harder than it looks to make a theme, every theme of mine that I edit says that there are no icons, and other images in it, but I know there is. =/
I can’t wait until the final release of the new Customize is out.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
What I need for there builder is the ability to create icons for other apps. Like thtouch,or the NES app. I seriously wish they would create that.