[Dash 3G, Snap General] neocorpse:
Ok so I've noticed a lot of tutorials floating around xda describing how to edit your homescreens so on so forth. I've also noticed most of which are for older phones like the Excalibur. While these tutorials still hold up for the new-ish phones like the Dash 3g, there are a few things I felt I could help with a bit.

With that being said, before I begin I will let everyone know now that I am still very much new to smartphone hacking, but I'm very well versed in skinning itself. I've skinned for most of the Stardock.net programs including but not limited to windowblinds, icon packager, desktop X, and object dock to name a few. Concerning phones i've done entire system wide skins for the old Moto RAZR V3.

Since .xml coding is very similar to the old logon template files I was able to decipher what happens in the .xml and .cpr files.

My hope is to be able to give people here a bit more freedom in how they would like their homescreens to look and feel pertaining to the panel graphics and text placement inside the panels. You'll find that these steps are relitively old and have been gone over before, but I've yet to see the actual graphics themselves changed. It's a lot easier than it sounds and the best thing about it is you'll only need notepad and a graphics editor to do it!

So let's begin and see if we can't completely destroy our phones together shall we?

Firstly you'll need to know exactly what files to look for. From now on I'm going to be assuming that everyone on the planet owns a WinMo 6.1 or 6.5 based phone. I'll be referencing based on my Dash 3G with 6.5.

The first thing we need to do is extract all the necessary files from our phones so we can edit properly and without incident. Make a folder anywhere on your PC that you will remember and call it something like "Dash 3G Files". Within that make three folders and name them XML, CPR, and ORIGANAL. We make the original folder so that all of our untouched files are stored safely away from our edited ones. This creates a failsafe backup folder of all our files in the event we end up editing too deeply or actually damage something.

Before we go further, one thing I should mention is your folder view on your PC. Since the PC has no real discernible view order upon first viewing your phone files I always right click an empty spot in the folder and change the view to type. To do this right click, hover "sort by", then click "type". What this does is re-orders your view type neatly into the types of files in the folder by groups. This will not harm your file structure in any way, but it makes searching for files a helluvalot easier!

After all the folders are prepared go into your phone through active sync or the vista version of, and browse to \Windows. There you will locate a file called, HTCSlidingPanel_myFaves.home.xml

This is the T-Mobile-Default panels layout with the fave five icons. Scrolling down abit more you will also find HTCSlidingPanel_320x240.cpr, both of which you will need to copy/paste into your new folders on your PC. Don't go closing windows just yet! We'll need to grab the panel graphics as well.

Scroll to the png section of windows and look for two files, Focus_Panel_Landscape.png and Focus_Panel_Action_Landscape.png. These are the panel graphics that are targeted by the .cpr file. After you've located them, select them and copy/paste them to your PC folders.

When you have all the necessary files there should be four.

HTCSlidingPanel_MyFaves.Home.xml

HTCSlidingPanel_320x240.cpr

Focus_Panel_Landscape.png

Focus_Panel_Action_Landscape.png

Now that we have all the files on your PC go ahead and select them all, right click, select properties, and uncheck read only, apply and OK.

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Since my phone won't allow me to change these attributes on my phone I'll assume the same thing will apply to all other phones. Since Windows wants to be a jerk and not allow these changes we will have to actually change the name of our files so that those rules no longer apply. Keep in mind that what ever you change them to you will also have to change them in both the cpr and xml files because those files are targeted by them. We'll get to that later.

GRAPHICS EDITING:

Go ahead and fire up your favorite graphics editor and take a look at the two panel graphics. Notice that they're both exactly the same?! Why I have no idea but those are the two the cpr calls for so that's what we edit. If you're lazy like I am you'll most likely see this as a gift from the skinning gods, accept it, and move on....lol. Bear in mind that we don't necessarily want to alter it's size in any way because if we go too crazy we get to edit the ENTIRE panel layout! So for the sake of ease and sanity we will only be editing it's basic shape and look.

I prefer a more tech look so I will be using a very small border with hard edges and angles

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I will also be increasing the transparency to almost nil, say 70 to 80%. I do this because I'm a graphics whore and I actually like to be able to see my nifty wallpapers. Once your graphic is edited go ahead and Save As, and rename the file to whatever you want. I usually stick to basics like for mine it was Focus_panel_Black_LS.png. This causes less confusion for me when I edit the code files.

Ok so this is the part where if you just threw the images in and switched homescreens you'd be cursing me and condemning my soul to rot in hell, but rest assured, we're not done! Now we begin the task of editing so that all our work is seen so we can all gleefully thumb our noses at windows while we hum the funeral march.

The first file we'll open is the xml since there's really not a lot to do. Basically here we can do things like change the order of our panels, remove or add panels within the parameters of the cpr file, and rename the target cpr file so it's recognized by our xml file. I know it's been done before but for completion I'll include order swapping.

Order="CClock;CHome;HTCMyFaves;CMusic;CMyPhotos;HTCWeather;CWelcomeCenter;Settings"

CPRFileName="HTCSlidingPanelEdit">

This tag refers to your homescreen contents and can be re-ordered simply by changing where it is entered in this tag, ie: CHome;CClock; so on so forth.

XML EDITING:

If you look directly under the order tags you will see CPRFileName="HTCSlidingPanel">

This tag denotes the target cpr file the xml is associated with. In order for our work to be witnessed in all it's glory we HAVE to change the target file to the name we gave our edited cpr. For purposes of ease I will simply name my cpr file and insert CPRFileName="HTCSlidingPanelEdit">

into the xml. This new cpr file will have to be placed into the Windows folder of your phone so it exists to the xml. We won't be adding it in just yet since we still have to edit it. Now that we have established our cpr target file within the xml and saved we can now close the xml.

CPR EDITING:

Open the cpr file with notepad and let's take a look. The first thing we're confronted with is the form layout and structure. Well since we're not doing too much here all we really need to look for is what it's looking for for images. Here's exactly what we're looking for:

Opacity="1.0" Source=".\Focus_Panel_Landscape.png" />

<ControlSequence ID="Action Sequence" FramesPerSecond="30" Loop="False">

<Image ID="Image" Left="0" Top="0" Width="320" Height="114" ScalingAlgorithm =

"TriLinear" Opacity="1.0" Source=".\FocusPanel_Action_Landscape.png" />

Opacity=1.0 deals with, you guessed it, the opacity of the image in how it's displayed on the homescreen. I haven't played with it because I do all of my transparencies within the image itself so I have no clue how it reacts. For safety's sake we'll leave it alone. Look right next to it though, and we see exactly what we are looking for!

Source=".\Focus_Panel_Landscape.png" /> Source=".\FocusPanel_Action_Landscape.png" /> tells the

homescreen to display those particular images as the panels! All we need to do now is change the names of those to the names that corrospond to our images and POOF it's friggin magic!! That's literally all we have to do to have custom panel graphics.

Now so far we have changed the order (considering you did), we've customized the panel graphics, and we've associated OUR panels with the homescreen! So what's next you ask? Now we will edit the clock layout and font size for the time text! WHY GOD WHY!? Because I actually HATED the size of the clock time text and it being smack dab in the middle of the panel in some sadistic plot to

purposely obscure my magnificent half-nakie, big-chested anime wallpaper!!!!

That's actually very simple too. The procedure is the same as previous. We locate the tags and edit. Keep in mind that all we really need to change is the Expanded view. The condensed views deal with the material outside of the focused panel image.

Scroll down til you spot this tag:

<!-- Time -->

<Text ID="Time" Left="0" Top="31" Width="320" Height="50" FontFamily="Nina" FontSize="26"

FontStyle="Regular" Wrap="False" VerticalAlignment="Middle" HorizontalAlignment="Center"

Trimming="EllipsisCharacter"></Text>

Where it says Left="0" and Top="31" is what we will be focusing on. the quoted numeric value represents where the text falls in accordance to the actual panel graphic in pixels. So if we were to replace the 0 with 5 the text will bump 5 pixels to the right. Keep in mind that the value is also dependent upon the size of the font. If we have a font size of 29 we don't have to move it very much at all to make a big difference, but if our font is small, say, 12, then we will need to move it by a considerably large distance to have the effect we're looking for. I always like to put my clock in the upper right corner of the panel so it's out of the way.

Here's what I changed to get what I wanted:

<!-- Time -->

<Text ID="Time" Left="230" Top="8" Width="120" Height="50" FontFamily="Nina" FontSize="12"

FontStyle="Regular" Wrap="False" VerticalAlignment="Left" HorizontalAlignment="Top"

Trimming="EllipsisCharacter"></Text>

By changing the size to 9 and moving it Left="230" Top="8" I've moved it to the far right corner and gave myself just enough room to allow for the text to shift as the clock numbers increase. What that basically means is you have to allot yourself room for 12:00PM because if you don't your clock will be cut off by the clipping for the panel. It may look awesome where it is at 1:00PM but as soon as twelve rolls around you're going to be annoyed by the space difference...lol.

INSERTING FILES:

Basically all that's left now is to put the files on your phone. The new xml file you pilfered and edited from the Windows folder will now be placed into \Application Data\Home folder.The panel images and cpr files will all go back into \Windows folder. If you've done everything correctly with renaming and retargetting all that's left to do is go to your Settings>Homescreen page and scroll to where your new homescreen is and select it! You'll know instantly if you did something wrong with the renaing/targetting because it most likely won't show up in the list. Even if it isn't there try clicking it anyways because mine still reads T-mobile Default and there were no extra homescreens.

That's about it for this tutorial, there's all kinds of little panel tweaks as well. All you really have to do is look for Title Text in the expanded panels in the cpr file you want to edit and you can edit it exactly how you edited the clock. This is how my homescreen panels look.

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If there's anything I missed or if you can add to this please let me know I'd love to hear your thoughts. I hope you all get some useage out of this, enjoi!