07 May 2008

Animated Icons Modding!
(for hacked Fetaure Pack 1 phones only)

As you may have already know, Nokia N95 was the very first S60 3rd edition phone with addition of the feature pack 1 and of course first S60 phone that features animated icons in the main menu.

Although animation isn’t as nice and fancy (its more like zooming and sliding towards you) as 3D transition effects in the multimedia menu it is more than welcome addition that puts UI customization on entire new level.

Unfortunately, realization isn’t that great as idea itself. There are some downsides that make this feature not as attractive as it should be. Animation menu is very limited and features only two options, it works only with default icons and there is no way to change the predefined icon at least it wasn’t possible till the platform hack.

Anyway, our mighty Z-Mario has just found the way to hack the templates and change the predefined with custom animated icons and here is the full guide ported from our forum section.

You'll need:

• X-plore or any file manager
• something to edit text
• a phone that can have animated icons in the menu

After playing with the appshelldata.xml file I saw a couple strings that got my attention, they were reffering to a .m3g file, which is the file format for the s40 animated icons and stuff, so I looked for anything with a .m3g extension in the ROM drive, guess what, I found 75 files and after playing a little more with the file I discovered this:

This shows the string for an folder without an animated icon

This is for one with an animated icon

This is for an app without an animated icon

This is for one with an animated icon

As you can see the difference is that the app/folder with an animated icon has this extra string (m3g_icon_file="icon file name")witjout the parenthesis (or whatever they are). Ok, now you know what to add, but, where are the m3g files? They're in Z:\resource\m3gicons, jsut change the "icon file name" part for the name of the icon (with this things "", lol I forgot their name).

Here are a few examples of what I did

Some of these are icons I've never seen. Could anyone with a phone with many icons upload more please? Specially the E90 and a latest FW N95. I'll try and see if this works with the m3g files that come with carbide.ui. I hope you like this mod . Oh yeah, the registro thing is the Logs app.

So here's the instructions again:

1. Open the appshelldata.xml file with a text editor
   
2. Locate the icon you want to try in Z:\resource\m3gicons, copy the name.
   
3. Add the string m3g_icon_file="icon file name" at ehe end of the app/folder icon specific string (look at the app images), if the icon's name is folder.m3g the string should be m3g_icon_file="folder.m3g".
   
4. Save the file, in the menu press options and select exit.
   
5. Enter the menu again and you should have the new icon.

UPDATE:
The Carbide.ui icons work I'll upload them ASAP.