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Using a 'skin' to change the look of the Treo 600 dialpad, favorites, and carrier logos.

Described by TvBilly

Skinner

Skinner is a 3rd party utility that allows you to customize the phone application graphics. It is not free, and has a very limited number of "skins" available for it. If you are using Skinner, you can not use any of the other methods to customize your phone buttons.
The only advantage to Skinner is that you don't have to know how to do anything "in the guts" of the palm OS to create your own skins. If you want to use any of the third party skins we are creating here, you don't want to use Skinner.

AQUA buttons by Derek Kelly

The very original AQUA buttons created by Derek were constructed by modifying the original Sprint phone.prc application. This meant that using the AQUA buttons required you to (essentially) replace the phone.prc application in your Treo. This was a bad thing. It meant you were not using the latest version of the phone.prc application, and it also meant that removing or updating or modifying anything required you to remove or replace the AQUA modified phone.prc application. If not done exactly the right way, your Treo went into endless reboot mode, requiring a hard reset to fix.

AQUA buttons overlay method by TvBilly

I wanted to mention that I had nothing to do with designing any of these great graphics, Derek Kelly did the AQUA buttons, and he deserves the praise for how they look, not me. I'm just figured out a better way to package them (and to incorportate other modifications).

Here's the AQUA and the AQUA+ (which additionally includes customized graphics for the Favorites buttons) series package story, and some files you can download:

I modeled AQUA+ after the AQUA phone buttons, and added a little color here and there. If you've installed one of the standard AQUA packages, you'll need to remove it; the AQUA+ version will not replace it and you'll wind up with both installed, which is not a good idea. Only one will work, and there's no way to predict which one...

To install the AQUA enhancement buttons, just download the appropriate file. If you download the prc version with your T600, the next time you go to the Phone application, you'll see the new graphics. No reset is necessary and you can leave Wireless mode on. If you download the zip version, you'll have to unzip it and install it.

AQUA+ phone buttons from MyTreoNet downloads

Once you've installed it, if you want to remove it, just delete the file however you delete any file on your T600. No need to reset or turn off Wireless mode. The next time you go to the Phone application, you'll have the old (boring) buttons.

These files are all overlay files, which are used to override resources in the built in Phone application. They are not patched versions of the Phone application.

You MUST remove any AQUA or LOGO or other overlay files you have previously installed beforeyou install this new one. You can only have one overlay working at a time, even if they're named differently. If you are running the original AQUA release, which you downloaded from the treo600essentials site, you must turn off your Wireless service, remove the two AQUA files you have installed, and (soft) reset your T600. This is the proper way to remove the original AQUA enhancement, because it was based on replacing not just the Phone overlay file, but also the whole Phone.prc application.

Warning!

If you do have to remove the actual Phone.prc application (because you installed an original version of AQUA you downloaded from treo600essentials), you have to be careful that you only delete the application, not the application and its databases and preferences. If you delete its databases (unknowingly or accidentally), you'll find that all your Favorites are gone. You can restore them from your Backup folder that HotSync maintains on your desktop computer. Also be sure that you remove the old AQUA Phone.prc and overlay file from your backup folder, or you may wind up restoring them too!

How do I delete an "overlay" and go back to the original buttons?

microSECONDS created the very inexpensive software Treo Button Managerfor very easy and efficient management of dialpad overlays. Aside from using this app, it remains quite easy to resort back to the original dialpad. Using one of the many file management tools (like the popular freeware FileZ), simply locate and delete the overlay from RAM. You may wish to return to the site at which the dialpad was downloaded in order to find the correct file in RAM.

Last edited by WikiChris
Sat, 20 May 2006 23:28 BST [diff]

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CategoryUserguide