Customize Icon Tiles for Galaxy SL i9003

As I had mentioned in the previous post about the TouchWiz 4.0, the icon backdrops/tiles are not set as it should be. I mean to say, even though in the apk, all of the tiles have been named as to which icon it should be applied, they are not been applied to them. My belief is that it must be because of the mismatch of the binary and the TouchWiz 4.0 apk, but I am not sure. I need some expert to comment here.

I have referred to this post, and worked my way, it was mean for touchwiz 3.0 for getting rid of the icon tiles by replacing them with transparent ones. I have followed the same procedure and replaced the unwanted tiles with the one I want to have.

All you need to have is a rooted phone, because for replacing touch wiz files you need to have root permissions. You also need to have ADB and Tool like Winrar or 7Zip. I use 7zip.

First take out the TouchWiz30Laucnher.apk file located in the '/system/app' folder and put on your desktop or somewhere. Use the below command. 

adb pull /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk <local_path>

Now you can open this apk file in 7Zip, do not extract, but replace the tiles you want by directly dragging and dropping in to the 7Zip window. The tiles would be located at '/res/drawable-hdpi-v4/' or similar folder, use your common sense, they would start with something like 'mainmenu or homescreen' and end with '_bg.png'

Once you are done replace this apk with the original apk present in the '/system/app/' folder. remember to keep a copy in case if you have done something wrong.

In the windows command prompt, use adb push to push the apk into SD Card.

> adb push <local_path>\TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /sdcard/
> adb shell
$ su
# mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# mv /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk.bak
# cp /sdcard/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk /system/app/TouchWiz30Launcher.apk
# chmod 744 TouchWiz30Launcher.apk
# mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# exit
$ exit
> exit

What I have done here its, first pushed the apk to sdcard, opened the adb shell, logged in as root, mounted the system partition as read/write, renamed the original file to keep a backup and then copied the new file from sd card to the original file's path, them changed the permissions as needed, and remounted the file system as read only and then exited.

I will update a screen shot, to show that all of market applications which use to use some crap icon tiles now use the system icon tiles and the UI looks pretty good, and I feel its much much better than before. Only problem is that the way it chooses background is still random, and every time you restart the icon tiles would change. :)