Required:

• Graphics program (I use Photoshop; try The GIMP for a free alternative, or the excellent Pixelmator for cheap on Mac)
• A Dropbox account (free) and Dropbox installed on your Mac or Windows machine
• The Dropbox Android app
• ASTRO (or any other file manager; I prefer ASTRO because it remembers which directory you’re in)

On your computer

Dropbox lets you set a directory to sync to the cloud automatically. Inside the Dropbox directory create a folder called “Sweeter Home”. Within this folder create another folder with your new theme name; we’ll call ours “Dropbox Dock”.

Using the grid templates I’ve provided here we’ll knock up a quick dock in Photoshop. This is just a dock image with buttons to represent common image use in Sweeter Home. Download the PSD file here if you want to make edits or just have a closer look.

Before we export the image to PNG, we want to crop the image down to the grid size as shown below. This makes the image easier to manage in Sweeter Home; we don’t need a full screen’s worth of blank space.

Export the dock image: in Photoshop File > Save for Web & Devices and set to PNG-24. Save the output to /Dropbox/Sweeter Home/Dropbox Dock. Name it dock1.png. Your sync icon will show that dropbox is syncing and will show a green tick when done.

On your phone

On your phone open Dropbox and login. Navigate to Sweeter Home > Dropbox Dock and you should now see your dock graphic listed there. Long-press it and choose “download”. (Tip: in Dropbox hit the menu button > Settings, then scroll down and check “Show file-status icon”. This gives you a visual indicator of each file in the directory that are now copied to your local storage).

Hit the home button to return to Sweeter Home (don’t back out with the back button; hitting home leaves Dropbox in the same directory for us to return to later).

Edit your theme

Now let’s edit our theme and add the dock image. Hit the menu button then Edit Theme. Hit the menu button again then More then New Theme. Click Yes to confirm. Now long-press your screen and choose New (or menu button then New). Choose Picture from the list.

Drag your Image block to the bottom of the screen and size it as below (note that the image defaults to your current background).

Now long press the block and choose Edit.

Note: any time you edit a block it’s always good practice to rename the block immediately. As you build more complex themes it pays to have everything named clearly while editing.

Click the Title field and name it “Dock”. Change the Positioning field to Distort to fit block (this helps the image scale better if people use your theme on lower screen resolutions). Change the Layer level to 2.

Now let’s choose the image for this block. Press Choose Image. Now press Image Source and change this to Internal Device Picture. Next, press Local Picture then press the Choose Image button.

Android  will present a list of apps you can choose to complete this action; we’re going to use ASTRO. In the ASTRO popup, navigate to /sdcard/Dropbox/Sweeter Home/Dropbox Dock. There’s our dock image. Press it.

Now back out to the homescreen.

Boom. There’s our dock!

Quick iteration

Now, I’ve changed my mind and I think I’d prefer to have the phone button on the left, and the email button on the right. I’ll make that change in Photoshop and export the PNG again. IMPORTANT: you must iterate the name of the image file, so here I’m going to call it dock2.png.

Open Dropbox on your phone. It should still be in the Dropbox Dock directory. Hit the menu button and then Refresh and you’ll see dock2.png. Long-press dock2.png and download it.

Press the home button and let’s edit our image block again. Press Choose Image, then press the field showing the URI to the current local image (something like file:///sdcard/dropbox…), then press the Choose Image button. Choose ASTRO to complete the action and you should be back in the Dropbox Dock directory on your SD Card, only this time dock2.png is there. Press that sucker! Now back out to your homescreen. Taa-daa! Your dock image is updated with phone on the left and email on the right!

You can repeat these steps over and over to quickly iterate images as you build your theme. It’s often important to me to get things pixel perfect, and if a shadow is too dark, or a line is 1 pixel out, I like to spend the time to make those things right. It’s not uncommon for me to have multiple instances of a graphic as I get things just right. Using Dropbox and ASTRO on a WiFi connection I can quickly move images to my SD card without ever having to use a USB cable or go through the painful mount/unmount process.

Coming soon

In Part 2 of this tutorial we’ll make the buttons active using Custom Trays and a Springboard.

One of the biggest differences between Sweeter Home and other home replacements is the ability to use images in your layouts. The images sit above the wallpaper with the rest of your content and swipe above the wallpaper as you move between left, right and middle screens. Rather than just dropping square images into your layouts (like a picture of your mum… not that there’s anything wrong with that…) using transparent PNG images can make for some rich looking environments in your home screen.

The video that showed people the potential of Sweeter Home when it comes to images was my Matricks demo. That was a pretty corny look at images – and they were pretty big too, not ideal for keeping your theme light weight and snappy – but it was a good indicator of what you can get up to with some imagination and Photoshop (or The GIMP). You can search the almighty Google if you need help creating images with transparent backgrounds in Photoshop and The GIMP. Below I’ll show you how to insert and use images in your layouts.

If you’re creating an image from scratch to use in your layout I recommend using my image templates. They’ll help you save your image to the actual grid sizes used in Sweeter Home. I always use TILE as my image setting to stop any scaling and display the image just as I saved it, so the templates help to position the image exactly.

In this example I’ll step through inserting my Thrillho menu into an empty screen. You can grab the image here, drop it onto your SD card and play along.

Enter Edit Layout mode, hit the menu button again and select new, then Image. The default image is now a small version of your wallpaper, so let’s hit menu and edit. In the first edit screen we’re going to change the imode to ‘TILE’ and let’s drop the layer back to 1 since later we’ll want to drop invisible icons above it.

Now we need to select the actual image from your SD card. Hit the button that reads ‘configure’. Here’s where we select the image you want to use. Change the imageType to ‘DEVICE’. Then hit the ‘Choose Image’ button. From the image list select the Thrillho menu.

Close and then close again. Now we’re back on your home screen with the Menu partially showing. Simply drag it to size and exit the layout mode.

As above, using the TILE setting keeps your images as you saved them, without scaling, but there are several options where you can fill or centre an image too, which may be useful for photo style graphics but probably not text. It also means you can’t position your graphic exactly but if you’re not using the graphic to launch apps or trays that’s probably not a big deal.

Lastly, in the current version of Sweeter Home (Preview 1) images do not save as part of your .sly file, so if you want to share your theme and have the image included you’ll need to have the image online somewhere (and hotlinkable I believe). Photobucket is a good sharing site that allows hotlinking but if you have your own filespace that will work fine too. To load an image from the net edit the image, ‘configure’, set the imageType to ‘INTERNET’, then click ‘Configure’ on the internetImage setting (the placing of this is a little corky so check the screen shots below). Type the URL location to your image and then close out to your homescreen. It’s important you get the URL exactly right so be sure to type it carefully.

So there you have the basics of using images in Sweeter Home. It seems a little complicated but once you’ve done it once or twice it’ll open a world of design possibilities to you. Remember that the processor in your phone is not as grunty as your home computer. Be aware of memory issues – crop your images accurately and try and keep the file size down. Most importantly, be creative and have fun!

OK, so you’ve installed Sweeter Home but you’re not sure how to install new themes! Below we’ll take a look at loading built in themes as well as downloading theme’s from the internet (or getting one from a friend) and loading it from your SD card.

When you launch Sweeter Home for the first time the help theme will load (below). Swipe between screens and jump from portrait to landscape (open the keyboard) to read more from the developer.

To load another built in theme hit the menu button on your G1 and select Themes. From the included list of build in themes let’s choose Caramel. Wait for it to load and there it is!

So loading the built in themes is nice and easy, but what about loading a theme from your SD card? We’ll assume you can figure out how to modify an existing built in theme and save it to your SD card, then load that, so let’s walk through downloading Dark Rising from this site and install it in Sweeter Home.

First, on your computer (not on your G1) visit the page for the latest Dark Rising theme. Click on “download” and save the zip to somewhere convenient on your computer.  UNZIP the file and have a look in the included folder. You’ll find a wallpaper, a readme file (hint: read it!), and a .sly file, which is the file type for Sweeter Home themes. Connect your G1 to your computer via USB and mount the G1. On your computer explore the SD card and locate SD/sweeterhome. That where we want to drag the .sly file for Dark Rising. See the screen shots below!

Next, on your computer un-mount your G1 and disconnect the USB cable. You now have the Dark Rising theme in the sweeterhome directory on your SD card, ready to install!

Back on your G1 and in Sweeter Home, hit the menu button and select Themes. Hit the menu button again and select SD Card. A list of all files in the sweeterhome directory on your SD will appear. Select Dark Rising 2.1.sly from the list and wait…

Congratulations! You just downloaded Dark Rising from the internet, unzipped it, dragged the .sly file to your SD card, and installed it in Sweeter Home. Enjoy!!

The two questions I seem to get asked most is how to install Sweeter Home and how to download and install a shared theme, so we’ll tackle these in two basic tutorials for the people that are just getting started.

If you’re running RC33 of Android on a standard G1 you should have no problem finding Sweeter Home in the Android Market. Open the Market app, hit search, and typing “Sweeter” should be enough to get you there.

If you can’t find Sweeter Home in the Market you can always go here on your computer and use this method to install on your Android phone.

Once installed there is no need to launch the app (although if you do you’ll find some handy instructions). To launch into Sweeter Home just hit the home button on your G1 and you’ll see the following screen. For the time being don’t use by default, but once you’re comfortable that you want to use Sweeter as you’re default home then go for it!

Congratulations, you’re now running Sweeter Home!

NOTE: if you have an ADP G1, or any non RC33 ROM flashed onto your G1 you may have trouble finding Sweeter Home, or you may not be able to find it at all. Although Sweeter Home is currently a free app it was designed with copy-protection included. In trying to remove the copy protection the developer found this actually broke all existing themes due to a database bug in Android, so if you can’t get hold of Sweeter Home you may just have to wait until the full version is launched, or hope that Android 1.5 fixes the db problem. (Or you could try this, but it may very well be an old build).