iPhone Polaroid Theme - How to Do It

Oct 23, 2008 at 12:37 AM
6 comments

Ok, since I posted my screen capture on Flickr, many people asked how to do it. Here's some quick pointers, but be sure to read all the info and links before you attempt to do it coz if you are not familiar with these keywords you'll have a lot of troubles: jailbreak, quickpwn, ftp, photoshop, action script.

iPhone main screen 21 Oct 2008

Download QuickPWN (Mac/PC versions available) and follow instructions carefully to install it on your computer. If you do it properly you will be able to connect to your iPhone and jailbreak it.
After all the fuss your iPhone will restart with 2 new programs installed: Cydia, Installer. These are programs to go online searching for available iPhone apps, enhancements, themes etc.
On your iPhone, run Cydia or Installer and find a program called Winterboard and install it. Winterboard is a program to load or unload themes (actually more than that).
You can go back to Cydia or Installer and browse the "themes" category to find a theme you like and download it. To actually use a theme, you just run Winterboard and load the theme you downloaded. Unfortunately this Polaroid theme is not available this way, so you will have to do the following.
Credit goes to a user named "lauzers" on ipodtouchfans.com forum who created the original Polaroid theme. You can download the theme files here on the forum on your computer. Many people also uploaded their own icon creations on that forum thread, you can download them as well for use in later steps. The theme and icons at this stage stay in your computer's drive.
Launch Cydia or Installer on your iPhone again and find a program called OpenSSH and install it.
On your computer, run an FTP program (if you don't have an FTP program, you google it and find one to install. I use Transmit on my Mac), following the instruction on "How to FTP with your iPhone/ iPod Touch". This step is to use an FTP program on your computer to connect to your iPhone so you can access the directories and find the right place to upload the Polaroid themes and icons.
The FTP program is now connected to your iPhone's directory. Navigate to find the directory /Library/Themes
Upload the entire Polaroid theme folder and icons to this directory
Quit the FTP program on your computer
Go back to iPhone and run Winterboard. You will find your Polaroid theme there, load it and quit Winterboard. There you go, your iPhone looks totally Polaroided.
Now to go one step further. Since many of us install programs that have their own icons, you may want to change them to Polaroid icons as well. e.g. Facebook, CameraBag, etc. Thanks to "lauzers" again, he/she uploaded a Photoshop action script to make everything easier, the script can be found here. Download it to your computer and install it in your Photoshop script directory.
Just run the script and it will prompt you to locate an image, modify it to the right size and tone, ask you to type in the icon's name and save it as *.png
You should name your Polaroid icon same as the program, e.g. for an iPhone program called Exposure, the icon's file name should be Exposure.png
Start from step 7 again to locate your themes directory on iPhone and upload your new icon
Go back to Winterboard and restart your theme and your new icon will replace the original application icon!

You can see from my screen capture, the icons with cursive fonts are from "lauzers" or other users on the forum. The ones with normal fonts were done by me. Some photos I used mine and some I just found on the net. Note that beneath the icons, there are still the applications' names in system font, but you can easily disable showing the names using Winterboard. Hope this helps!

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[this is good]

if i owned an iphone this would be my theme now!

[this is good]

Yeah, I am saving this in case I ever buy an iPhone. This is awesome.

[this is good]

This was amazing. I feel pretty empowered now, having done almost all of that. The only issue I ran into was that when I went into the directory /library/ there was no themes folder. So I created one, and added both polaroid folders that came out of the .zip, and opened Winterboard, and...nothing. Any idea what I did wrong?

Never mind! Tricky folders! Thanks so much. I'd never even thought about jailbreaking before. I learned so much tonight!!

Erin, I guess I had the same mistake. I thought "root" folder was root directory, but actually "/" was the root instead. So you've done yours finally?