Theme Magic

Let's get started! :)

First of all thank you for downloading Theme Magic, now let's get you started making themes!

The first step is rather obvious, you need to extract the .zip to it's own folder. Easy!

You probably already guessed it

We're gonna click on the "Theme Magic" icon now :)

Once you run it, you'll notice it does a few things to set itself up. Most importantly it's going to set up all the directories and files necessary to run properly. Please avoid renaming or moving these folders as it will ruin the program's ability to navigate and properly generate and place files.

Once this is done, just press any key to continue, and we're ready to start making themes!

Let's make our first Respring Logo.

You will be presented with a list of projects you can start, from this list let's go ahead and choose "Respring Logo" by choosing 1.

Now you'll see that you can either start from the beginning, or jump right to generating the particular files you need if you have already started your project. Let's choose option number 1.

Now it's going to ask you for a project name, this is just so it knows what to name the directory so that you can identify it, and yes the name can use spaces.

And just like that, all the directories and all that good stuff have been set up for you :)

Now let's get to the images.

We're already half way done!

At this point, if you haven't already, it's a good time to place your seed image in the SANDBOX folder. the SANDBOX folder acts as a temporary place to hold your image(s) until it's time to use it / them to generate your theme's images.

You're going to want to take the image you want as your respring logo (roughly 500x500px with transparent background), and place it in this folder. Now we'll rename it to "Black.png", and if you would like to make a white version for black iPhones as well, place a white version of your logo in the folder and name it "White.png".

Now go back to the program and press 1 to continue. It's going to ask what theme you'd like to generate the images for, and you can just enter the project name you just gave it. I made mine called "Test Theme1", so that's what I entered in the example.

Now the program will find your project and let you know it's ready to proceed, and all you have to do is continue and it will generate all the images required.

Get things under control

Hah! Get it? Like..... because it's a control file?...... ahem.

Alright so now everything is done for your theme except the control file. This file is necessary to tell Cydia and your iPhone about the package it's installing. It's honestly as easy as it gets, and I've included some nice examples and formats for each object so it should be pretty hard to mess up :)

Oh, and please try to just use letters, numbers, and spaces! no ,()<>?/ please!

Once you've made it through the questions, it will generate and place your control file into your theme's directory. Now everything is good to go! Let's take a look at what we've got.

Head into the Respring Themes folder

and find your new theme! Inside it's folder you'll find that it's generated all the necessary structures and files for you. Everything is now officially done and ready to package :)

Time to pack your theme into a .deb

For this you'll need to download WinSCP, a FTP program that also allows console commands like the one you need to package your theme :)

Now go ahead and use it to connect to your phone (sorry, you'll have to look up how to do that part, it's easy though I promise!). You're going to navigate to the root directory on your iPhone, and the Theme Magic/Respring Themes/ directory on your computer.

Drag the entire folder onto your iPhone, and for the sake of packaging it, you can then remove all spaces from the folder's name once it's on your phone.

Up towards the top you'll see a little Console icon, click that! Once the prompt opens, you're going to type the following:

dpkg -b <your theme folder name>

So, for example, my folder (after removing spaces) was TestTheme1, so I would type:

dpkg -b TestTheme1

It will throw some errors, but this is absolutely fine :)

Just let it finish and then close out and you'll see a new .deb file on your phone's directory! This is your packaged theme, all ready to go!


Now you can either install it on your phone by opening it, or submit it to Cydia, or even give it directly to others to install :)

Alright so if you want to make a Zeppelin icon instead, it's really the same EXACT thing, you just don't need a White.png, only a Black.png image to work with.

For Alkaline Battery themes, however, there is one key difference. You need two Background images (BlackBG.png and RedBG.png), as well as an image for every stage of the battery "draining" or "charging" (20 images for each).

For my example I went into Photoshop and named my full battery image "Black20.png", drained a little of the battery away and saved it as "Black19.png" and so on until I saved the fully drained battery as "BlackBG.png".

Repeat this for the "draining" images as well, but with red images, and saving them as "Red20.png", "Red19.png", etc.

If your battery theme drains in larger intervals

For example, if your theme has 5 bars, each one disappearing or "draining" at 20% intervals, you may need to save the 100% battery image as "Black20.png, Black19.png, Black18.png, AND Black17.png", then the 80% drained image as "Black16.png, Black15.png, Black14.png, AND Black13.png", and so on so that the images match the drain percentage. Make sense?

If you ever need help

Find me on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit as Easy_Toast :)