WinterBoard is the new theme tool for 2.0 created by Saurik, mastermind of Cydia. It’s much like SummerBoard except way more powerful and it even works with all your favorite SummerBoard Themes. This app is in it’s infant stages since it is merely a day old. Right now the GUI is not the prettiest but this will change in the very near future.

In addition to supporting standard SummerBoard style themes, Winterboard also supports themes for practically any image or set of images including app themes, batteries, sliders, and more. This also includes images that make up the system interface! With all these features and possibilites WinterBoard is no doubt the new SummerBoard and you can expect to see some amazing things come from it.

Of course now that we have a working solution for adding themes, all of our themes are up and ready to install from Cydia.

Be sure to REBOOT after installing WinterBoard or themes will not work.

Theming with HTML

So, while staring at the desktop, I realized “wait, why don’t I make that a website? then you could do all kinds of neat things with it!”. This dream has been made a reality with the latest version of WinterBoard. There is a new file you can add called Wallpaper.html which puts a UIWebDocumentView behind SpringBoard.

This view has a transparent background and has been told not to clear what’s behind it, so you can set its background-color: CSS to transparent if you want to see through to Wallpaper.png (although you can also use standard HTML to handle the backgrounds now rather than resorting to that specific case).

The example theme, “Saurik”, uses this to do a cross-fade background between two images (as I really couldn’t decide which one I liked better ;P). Now, for those who have tried to do such effects before with MobileSafari and felt it was way too slow (as the JavaScript engine is miserable and the way it renders is equally bad) you should seriously check it out.

The way I did this (and this is just a property of my theme, you can do anything you want obviously) is to use the WebKit-specific CSS properties Apple provided us with for doing transforms and animations. These work beautifully and are super fast. For more documentation on these, you should go to Apple’s iPhone Reference Library and get the two guides they have for download.

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