Change your iPhone carrier graphic with ease
September 20th, 2007
Do you like staring at your “AT&T” or “cingular” carrier graphic at the top of your iPhone? Well, I don’t, and apparently others are joining the carrier graphic changing party. Today The Spicy Chicken released a new app for the iPhone that does a lot more than their previous DocSwap app. It allows you to change the carrier image, the dock background, plus the ring, mute, silent and speaker graphics with ease.
Personally, I could care less about everything but the carrier image. I immediately went to work to figure this one out. First, install the new Customize.app “over the air” using the Installer.app. There also some fun alternate default graphics that you can download and install. I recommend them for playing around, but I didn’t personally care for any of them so I figured out how to make my own. Here’s how:
As described on this page, the carrier graphic must be a maximum of 20px in height. The width is variable, meaning that it can be as narrow or as wide as you want. Don’t go too wide or you may disrupt the iPhone normal display of the time and other necessary icons. The aforementioned page does not mention that your images need to be transparent, so be sure to save them as such. Here’s the format:
yourimage-1.png: a 20px high image that looks good on a white background. Make the background transparent, but the artwork you add must be dark.
yourimage.png: a 20px high image that looks good on a black background. Make the background transparent, but the artwork you add must be light.
You can name your images whatever you prefer, but avoid the dash except for the “-1″ in the one image noted above. Your image can contain colors, icons, or text.
Once you have created your images, use iBrickr (Win) or Breezy (Mac) to upload them to your phone in the /var/root/Library/Customize/CarrierImages/Designer/ folder. Once they are there, you can fire up the Customize.app and you’ll see your image in the “Carrier Image” section. Select it, click OK, then click the iPhone’s home button which will force a soft reset. You’ll now see your image at the top instead of your phone’s default carrier image. How cool is that?
If you’d like to use my Photoshop file, just click here to download it. The font I used is Arial, 12px, and there are two layers: one for the black version, one for the white version. Be sure to crop your images (width) if your output is more narrow than my example.
Enjoy! If you found this article helpful, please digg it!
