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Winterboard is so nice and revolutionary that I just had to make my own theme called BigBoss Fantasy Pack. So I did. This is a Winterboard theme, it will not work on SummerBoard or the likes.
The theme presents you with 100 surreal / scifi / fantasy images hand picked and resized for the iPhone. I wrote a javascript page to cycle them randomly and fade the images in every 15 seconds. It’s gorgeous. Take a look at some screens:
OMG Winterboard is so cool! Saurik has just added dynamic backgrounds. Your background can now be an HTML web page using webkit. The possibilities are endless. He threw together a small theme called “Saurik” that fades in and out between two images as an example. But so much more can be done with this.
Here is an exerpt from his site:
Theming with HTML
So, while staring at the desktop, I realized “wait, why don’t I make that a website? then you could do all kinds of neat things with it!”. This dream has been made a reality with the latest version of WinterBoard. There is a new file you can add called Wallpaper.html which puts a UIWebDocumentView behind SpringBoard.
This view has a transparent background and has been told not to clear what’s behind it, so you can set its background-color: CSS to transparent if you want to see through to Wallpaper.png (although you can also use standard HTML to handle the backgrounds now rather than resorting to that specific case).
The example theme, “Saurik”, uses this to do a cross-fade background between two images (as I really couldn’t decide which one I liked better ;P). Now, for those who have tried to do such effects before with MobileSafari and felt it was way too slow (as the JavaScript engine is miserable and the way it renders is equally bad) you should seriously check it out.
The way I did this (and this is just a property of my theme, you can do anything you want obviously) is to use the WebKit-specific CSS properties Apple provided us with for doing transforms and animations. These work beautifully and are super fast. For more documentation on these, you should go to Apple’s iPhone Reference Library and get the two guides they have for download.
Thanks to Saurik, developer of Cydia, we now have Winterboard on 2.0 OS! This provides some of the functionality that SummerBoard provided but it looks like it will be much much more in the near future. Currently the settings dialog just allows you to select your theme, but you can expect this to be expanded in the future. (Note: the configuration GUI is not done yet).
At the release of Winterboard, many themes were also released into Cydia. All of our Summerboard themes are now available for use! Check out a couple of my favorites (from left to right, Xadacka’s Mystic Blue, iWood Realize, Chromium:
Winterboard already does more than SummerBoard. It will theme many more elements of your U/I. You can theme the battery images and other graphics. Right now it’s being worked on to theme elements inside the .artwork files. Really incredible for being less than 1 day old!
Update:A new version is released that now supports theming inside of .artwork files! This is major. It will open the door for themes to become full iPhone themes changing the color of your alerts, graphics in apps, and all sorts of amazing things!
Glossy Keyboard is released. This is now my favorite keyboard made by Allen over at planet-iphones.com made this for me and I love it! Check out the screenshot and see how gorgeous this keyboard is! You can get this from Cydia.
I have merged all the themes, graphics, keyboards, and apps from planet-iphones.com into our repository. This adds another 65 packages to our repository. There is some unique content and some very unique graphics. Check out the new packages!
And with this merge, our repository is now the largest community source and probably the largest iPhone repository in the world (as of this moment we beat STE packaging by 1 package).
Vista Perfection by SpecWorks is much more than just a normal SummerBoard theme. It replaces your sounds, sliders, lockscreen as well as your icons. It requires a very specific layout on the springboard to make it look right. The theme is created by Spec Works but uses many of my apps. I was very excited when I got the challenge of putting this into installer. The theme originally required a lot of manual steps for installation. My goal was to automate this as much as possible. It uses two of my existing apps: Categories and BossPrefs. In addition to that, I had to write a couple apps just for the installation of this theme. One app was the help screen viewer that I previously released here. The other is an application launcher to get the “Control Panel” button to actually launch BossPrefs.
The instructions for setting up the theme are provided by an icon on your springboard after installation.
Gates and iSpazio bring us a massive icon pack for theme builder. This pack has 785 icons for you to make your own themes with the theme builder app. This should allow you to make a wide variety of themes. Enjoy!