Coming soon – check the Sweeter Home theme list in the next 24 hours.
Galaxy Nexus Only (or any other HD screen – xhdpi 720 x 1280).

• Features: a live background colour picker – just choose your colour from the selection bar at the bottom
• Theme Resolution: 480×800 (Nexus One, Evo, Droid etc)
• Find: Search “socialplus” or “Lemon” in the theme list

Remember you can follow me on Twitter, and I’m on Google+ now too.

Get PYE

REMIX!

Download this PSD to make any changes; roll your own graphics and make your own version of Groupie.

Please post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter so I can check out your new versions.

REMIX!

Download this PSD to make any changes; roll your own graphics and make your own version of ThrillhoHD.

Please post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter so I can check out your new versions.

I’d like to do the same thing here. If you have a theme and you’d like some direction and advice on how you can better use Sweeter Home’s editing tools to enhance your theme, leave me a comment on this post with your Theme name and Sweeter Home user name.

I’ll take your theme for a work out and then break down areas where you can improve, as well as giving advice on best practise for building your themes. You’ll be able to make your theme more solid and fun to use, and we can all learn from each other.

Let’s go!

Instructions:

• Tap the PYE logo for notes
• Tap the screen for the time
• SMS and Phone ‘buttons’ will prompt for your preferred short-cut the first time
• One screen only, no scrolling.

Performance:

• The images are the smallest I could get them but they still may eat your RAM from time to time, particularly during homescreen redraw (though I haven’t experienced this)
• Built on a Desire HD, should work fine on any WVGA device.
• Seems to work good on my GF’s Legend too. Do you want an HVGA (320×480) version? Let me know in the comments below!

^ Back to top

Sweeter Home’s deep toolset means that you can build almost anything you can imagine as your home launcher. With that in mind, sometimes the hardest part of getting started with a theme is coming up with a good design concept.

Here’s how I generally go from beginning to end with a Sweeter Home theme:

Inspiration

I look EVERYWHERE for design inspiration. I subscribe to a ton of art and design blogs in Google Reader, including Photoshop tutorial sites and photography blogs. I also read this homescreen topic at XDA fairly religiously. I also throw useful links, tutorials and assets here on this site. Lastly, I keep a Google Bookmarks list of Sweeter Home Reference, which is where I dump anything I find on the net that might influence me later when it comes to building a theme. Look for anything that you can translate to a phone UI. Anything at all, no matter how abstract or “out there”.

Build, Iterate

Get building. For design I use Photoshop. If you can get it, use it; there’s a reason it’s the industry standard in image manipulation. If you’re new to PS then find some tutorials on using Layer Styles. You’ll soon be doing EVERYTHING with Layer Styles, trust me. Be sure to read my tutorial on using Dropbox to quickly refine your images. Take the time to get things right.

Of course you’ll need to get good at building in Sweeter Home too. That can take some time, but once you climb that steep learning curve you’ll reach a place where you can move what’s in you’re head to the phone quickly and effectively. Sweeter Home has a ton of little tricks you can use to make building easier, and make UI behave in ways most people don’t think of. The more time you spend with Sweeter Home the easier this will get.

Think: Usability

When designing and building your theme remember that it has to be usable. If you’re designing for a wider audience then keep that audience in mind at all times. Every button you include has to work, and work as expected. Not everyone has the same widgets that you have installed: should you include them? Are the quirks of your specific theme easy for a new user to understand?

For the most part I always run a theme in a close-to-finished state for at least 2-3 days if not longer. I need to know that all the features work as I intend them to, and I haven’t misplaced a block which messes something up in a situation I wasn’t expecting. Test your own themes and make them perfect before you upload them for the whole to see.

It’s my hope that one of the reasons my themes get downloaded so much is that they just work right out of the box.

What about you?

How do you go about building your Sweeter Home themes? What do you wish you could do better? Who do you build for? What do you love about some other people’s themes?

Let me know in the comments! Let’s all learn from one another.

• Theme Resolution: 240×320 (X10 mini, IDEOS, Aria etc)
• Find: Search “BladeSciFi7″ or “taffypride” in the theme list
• Install now: Click to show QR code, then scan

It’s great to see someone building for QVGA, which I’ve often thought about but never got round to. If you know of any other great QVGA themes let me know in the comments!