[Verizon Droid Charge] spc_hicks09:
Hey guys! Someone recently posted that they wanted to start to making their own themes and I posted a very long reply and figured, might as well post a "somewhat easy to understand" tutorial here for everyone.

So you want to make your own themes?

First off, it is important to know that if you plan on porting any themes over and releasing it to the masses, that you get permission from the theme owner first!!

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOUR PHONE EXPLODES OR MELT! lol

NOTE: IF YOU'RE A NOOB (you know if you are) DO NOT MESS WITH ANY IMAGE THAT ENDS IN ".9" UNTIL YOU READ UP ON THEM.......A LOT! IF YOU'RE JUST REPLACING AN IMAGE, THEN READ ON.

A good write up on .9 (9 patch) images can be found here:

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/draw9patch.html

What you will need:

Apkmanager: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=695701

7zip: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

An empty flashable zip: http://www.multiupload.com/DBEMBUOCND

Lot's of time on your hands!

GETTING STARTED:

Apkmanager is going to be your "all-in-one" tool for making a theme in Windows.

(I'll go into all the options of apkmanager a little later)

The process you need to follow is actually kind of simple. It's just very time consuming.

First you will need to make the images that you want (unless you are porting a theme).

Now what you need to do is one way or another, get the framework-res.apk and the SystemUI.apk from your phone, if you want to theme the launcher then you need to get the TouchWiz30Launcher.apk as well. (If you don't want to mess with using adb, use Root Explorer, just copy the apk then paste on your sdcard, then copy and paste from your sdcard onto your pc.)

Extract apkmanager to somewhere easy like the desktop and you should end up with a folder named "apkmanager" or whatever.

Inside that folder, you should have the following folders:

Other

place-apk-here-for-modding

place-apk-here-for-signing

place-apk-here-to-batch-optimize

place-ogg-here

projects

Then the following files:

log

Script

DO NOT MODIFY THE NAMES OF ANY OF THESE FILES OR FOLDERS OR NOTHING WILL WORK!

Take the 3 files that you got from your phone and place them in the "place apk here for modding" folder.

Double click to open the "Script" file

Press "22" and hit enter to set your current job

Select either 1,2 or 3 for whichever apk you want to start on first

Select "9" to decompile

Once decompile is done, go inside the "projects" folder and now you have a folder inside there with whatever the name is of the apk you just decompiled.

Inside that folder are the images and XML files you need to replace (you might not have to edit any of the XML files, that's a little more advanced unless you already know how to.)

Most of the images you will need to edit will be in the following folders of each apk:

res>drawable

res>drawable-hdpi

You can look around in there and see what all needs to be done. I will get into themeing the contacts and phone and all that a little later.

Once you get everything done and you're ready to test it out, you need to go back to that "Script" file in apkmanager and open it back up. Now you're going to do pretty much the same stuff you did when you were decompiling the apk, in order to compile the apk.

In the Script for apkmanager, you're going to press "22" and hit enter, then select which file you want to compile first by either pressing 1,2 or 3.

Select the file and hit enter, then press "11" and press enter to compile the apk. As long as you didn't mess anything up during the process of changing stuff, you shouldn't receive any errors. If you do, you need to figure out what it was you messed up on and fix it.

Go through and compile the apks that you edited. Once that is done, you will go to your "place apk here for modding" folder again and you will notice that you have 3 new files in there:

unsignedframework-res.apk

unsignedSystemUI.apk

unsignedTouchWiz30Launcher.apk

Remember that empty flashable zip you downloaded earlier? Now you need it.

Right click on the flashable zip and mouse over "7zip" and click on "Open Archive"

Take the unsignedSystemUI.apk and the unsignedTouchWiz30Launcher.apk and place them in the "app" folder. Now rename those to their original names:

SystemUI.apk

TouchWiz30Launcher.apk

Now take that unsignedframework-res.apk and place it in the "framework" folder of the flashable zip. Rename that one to "framework-res.apk."

Now you can close out of the flashable zip file and place it on your sdcard.

Reboot into recovery, wipe cache partition, wipe dalvik, now go to "mounts and storage" and mount /system.

Now go back and flash the zip file you just put on your sdcard.

Since you wiped your cache and your dalvik, the reboot will take a little while. You should now be good to go!

NOTE: Since I did not create apkmanager, I will not be able to answer many questions about it but feel free to ask. If I don't have an answer for you, Just go back to the post above where you downloaded it, and post your question there.

As stated earlier in my post, I will get more in depth about all this stuff as soon as I have a little more time to post everything.

Please enjoy and happy themeing!!!!!! :D