Screen Capture In Galaxy SL

I was always assumed that this phone does not come with the default screen capture option. i accidentally got a screen capture when some call screen got captured by a combination of key press.

Then I searched a while and found that holding back key pressed and then pressing the home key will capture the screen shot.

I always used the root utility shoot me to capture the screen. I think this is a great deal.

Adding more wallpapers to TwWallpaperChooser.apk

Now that I have explored how to de-compile an APK, we can play with its resources and XML files. The first experiment I did was to remove unwanted wallpapers from the TwWallpaperChooser.apk and add what I want it as default.

so here it goes, the basic procedure remains same, as decompile the apk and then recompile the apk.

First de-compile the apk into a folder with the below commands
apktool TwWallpaperChooser.apk TwWallpaperChooser

You would see a folder created with the files as shown below.

The contents of the folder is as shown below.

The important folder, and file you need to know in this case are /res/drawable-hdpi/ this folder contains all the images and their thumbnails, thumbnails are with _small in the name, and are of size 170x142, and main wallpaper images are of size 960x800. You can add more pictures and their thumbnails with the same size.

The reference to these files are made in the file /res/values-hdpi/arrays.xml, you need to edit this file to add more files and then recompile to generate a TwWallpaperChooseNew.apk.

Once you have your New APK ready, open both the NEW and OLD APK in some zip manager such as 7zip, and copy the resources.arsc from NEW apk to OLD apk, and also copy the images you have added into corresponding folders, and you are ready. The apk can be renamed to .zip file, so that it can be opened in zip manager, and once your copy is done, rename back to .apk file. 

You can now copy this file into /system/app and chmod to 644 and you are ready to use new TwWallpaperChooser.apk with added wallpapers. 

Here is few screen shots from what I have done. 

Hope you would enjoy doing it. Let me know if you have any questions.

How to root Galaxy SL (i9003) Gingerbread 2.3.6 XXKPU

I have updated my firmware to Gingerbread 2.3.6 XXKPU and I did not find an easy way to root this firmware.  I had searched enough on web and did not find anything which I thought would work. Tried few promising methods but they did not work.

Lastly I was seeing too many places mentioning about the CF-Root and was wondering what is this. I happen to see a video which shows the PDA to be replaced with the CF-Root corresponding to the XXKPU binary, which can be downloaded form the links in the post here.

Here you can download the CF root for many of the i9003 firmwares. Infact, what ever is your phone (Samsung) you can almost follow the same procedure, and you need to find the right CF-root file. Then the flashing procedure can be found on this you tube video here. Hope this helps everyone.

Some of the useful info when working with ADB on phone

For remounting the system partition as RW on Galaxy SL, (need to be super user)

# mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

For mounting back to RO

# mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

Basic ADB commands

# adb push <local_path> <remote_path>

# adb pull <remote_path> <local_path>

# adb install <path_to_apk>

If you have not installed the cp command may not work, the work around would be 

# cat [source_file] > [destination_file]

The command binaries would be located at this location, /system/bin/ And if you had installed busybox, in /system/xbin/ then first the above path is looked for command, and later the below path.

The /system partition has limited memory, so if you try installing too many applications here, then you may run out of space, and its a better idea to delete many of the unwanted bloat applications from there. I have deleted the following apps and they do not be of much use for me. May be if its not useful for you, you can delete them as well. And you can also delete any other apps which are of no use for you.

1. Samsung Apps [They are meant for Bada, and of no use in Android! wonder why its added here!]
2. BuddiesNow.apk/odex
3. thinkdroid.apk/odex [ThinkFree Office - I have installed Polaris Office instead of this, which is much better]
4. Day.apk/odex
5. DualClock.apk/odex
6. SamsungWidget_Calenderclock.apk/odex
7. SamsungWidget_Feedandupdate.apk/odex
8. SamsungWidget_stockclock.apk/odex
9. SamsungWidget_Weatherclock.apk/odex

All the best, and keep a backup of the file before altering or deleting any file inside /system partition, so that you can restore if something goes wrong, and I am not responsible for any thing if at all it goes wrong :)
Some useful tips and tricks about galaxy S/SL can be found here, its quite long, but when free go through.

Samsung Touch Wiz 4.0 Look and Feel

This post is dedicated for showing the Look and Feel of Touch Wiz 4.0 Running on Galaxy SL (i9003). If you follow my previous post, absolutely there are no bugs, no lags, and only excitement !!

Here are few screen captures for showing all the features

 Fig 1: Picture showing home screen, if you observe, you can add as many icons as you want in the dock below. And the look and feel of home icon is updated.

Fig 2 : Picture showing the app drawer, you can see that instead of black now you have the transparent screen, and icon tiles have been removed, in fact you have option to enable or disable the same

 Fig 3 : Home screen widgets are more standardized and looks more like Galaxy S-II, I usually don't like widgets and only widget I use is weather bug.

Fig 4: Wallpaper options are more neat and clean, and it looks much better as show above.

Fig 5 : App drawer editing is also improved and you can specify the number of columns and rows and also the number of icons. The best part is if some one likes to have folders then that option is also allowed. There is unofficial version named as Touch WIz 4.5 also available in XDA which seems to be modified a lot, and so, I do not recommend, but it does have lot of other enhancements.

The icon tiles can be enabled to have backdrops for each icon, but it seems to be randomly picking the tiles from somewhere. I myself have opened the apk file in 7zip and see that most of the apps have well defined backdrops/tiles, but the TouchWiz 4.0 is messing up with it, and seems to be mismatch when it picks the icon tiles, so you may not be very impressed with icon tiles, you may have to live with it. I absolutely have no idea how they are picking the icon tiles at this point, if someone knows and why it behaves like this please do let me know.

Install Samsung TouchWiz 4.0 for Galaxy SL i9003

If you have updated to the Gingerbread 2.3.4 and rooted by following posts on my phone, then you would see that there is not much cosmetic changes done to the User Interface, except for the status bar battery icons etc. The easiest way is to update to a new UI is to install any other launcher such as Go Launcher. In fact Go Launcher Ex is very powerful, and it has most of the features you would look for in your phone, and also many themes are available for download. As a second launcher I would always have it on my phone, in case the primary one fails after some updates etc. 

But the battery consumption seems to be very high, may be because of the visual effects. The main reason I wanted to update to new UI theme is that, with Galaxy S2, Samsung had get rid of that icon tiles which would give an iPhone type look. But sometimes the choice of wrong color for the tile makes it look very boring, and some how I am bored with it, and want to get rid of it.

So, I come across this link on XDA, and he has given the TouchWiz 4.0 Launcher apk, which is working fine with my Galaxy SL, and I have obsolutely no issues with it. Few of the Widgets does not work with it, especially the Samsung ones and mostly you don't need them at all, so you can delete them get rid of it.

The install process is very simple,

• Copy it to SD card via ADB or any other method.
• Use ADB connection, and login as root.
• Mount the /system/ as RW
• There will be TouchWiz30Launcher.apk and TouchWiz30Launcher.odex files, make a back up of them incase if something goes wrong.
• Replace the TouchWiz30Launcher.apk with the new one downloaded.
• You need to place the lib file inside the /system/lib folder
• Use cat source > destination as cp command does not work

Now that most of things work except for Samsung Widgets, There is an Share button when you edit the app drawer, which would cause a force close, you need to fix this.

Download the ShareApp.apk from here, and place it in the /system/app/ folder following the same method mentioned above.

You are DONE, you would have a fully running, low battery consuming Samsung Touch Wiz 4.0 ready on your phone, Enjoy.

The Benefits are as below. 

For appdrawer:

• column count
• item count per page
• free sort mode / alphabetical sort
• enable/disable colored tile

For Home screen:

• enable Landscape mode (if you change from off to on -> needs a reboot to take effect)
• use big page indicator icons
• whether to show the App names
• uninstall apps from home screen [on/off]
• page indicator icon fades off after swiping [on/off]
• amount of rows on home screen
• screen count-defaultscreen (starts at 0)
• amount of icons in dock (not tested with higher numbers then 5)