How to Create Rotating Wallpaper for iPhone using Winterboard

by Simon Ng on January 27, 2009

For any jailbreak iPhone users, I believe you have installed Winterboard, which is a great theme manager to skin your iPhone, as an essential application. There are a tons of free Winterboard themes on the Internet. But do you ever think of create your own theme? I’m a Mac user and always love to have rotating wallpaper that changed over time on my iMac. Wouldn’t be a great idea to have the same on iPhone? You can pick a series of your best photos and got them rotated in iPhone background.

Thanks for the great design of Winterboard. If you have basic Javascript / HTML knowledge, you can easily create your own Winterboard theme. I’ve built my first Winterboard called “Rotating Wallpaper”, that allows you to select a total of six photos that will be rotated in every 15 seconds. The theme is quite primitive and more features (like fading effect) will be added later.

Installing Rotating Wallpaper

The theme is freely for download and you can install it via DiskAid or SSH. For details of install procedures, download the theme here and follow the procedures mentioned in “How to Install Winterboard theme on iPhone without using Cydia”.

Using Your Own Photos

You’re free to replace the default photos with your own for the rotating wallpapers. After you decompress the theme package, go to the “Private” folder. All wallpaper images can be found there. Just copy your own photos and replace them. But make sure you should have the correct filename and the image should be best with width of 320 pixels and length not shorter than 460 pixels.

After replacement, you can just copy the “Rotating Wallpaper” folder to “/Library/Themes” folder on iPhone. Then launch Winterboard and select the “Rotating Wallpaper”, followed by clicking Home button.

Wait for a while and you can enjoy Rotating Wallpaper with your own photos on iPhone. Let us know if you find any problem or have any suggestion for the theme.

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Tagged as: iPhone, winterboard, Winterboard Theme

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Alexander Dombroff January 30, 2009 at 2:07 pm

I`ve been wanting forever to get an iPhone, and i might just do that in the next week. Te information i fond on your blog are very useful. Thank you for sharing it with us.

2 Boy February 3, 2009 at 10:48 am

hello this rotating wallpaper is not working I try do it same like in instructions…

3 Ian March 9, 2009 at 11:52 am

Hi, this is exactly what i have been looking for. cant wait for the transition effects to be implemented. was also wondering why this app is not on cydia? loads of ppl are looking for this kind of thing

4 Kai July 29, 2009 at 1:51 am

Is there a way to edit the code so that I can rotate all the images I put in the directory to be displayed

5 Paul Dubya September 25, 2009 at 2:54 am

This will work if you edit the code. Change the image extensions from “.jpg” to “.png” and use only .png format images.

Windows
1.Open the Wallpaper html file with notepad.
2.Look for the image names. ie; img1.jpg
3.Change all six image file extensions to “.png”
4.Save .png images into the “private” folder.

Thanks for the code Simon!

6 sykO September 29, 2009 at 5:44 pm

Hello, the idea is great, seen it done before, main question though, I have set it so my pictures do cycle through, I have also heard that the ”Wallpaper.html” Can be used to make the cycle faster, if so, any ideas on how to do that?

7 Aurora October 22, 2009 at 2:28 am: sykO, you can modify Wallpaper.html and change this line:
setTimeout(fade, 15000);

The current setting is 15000 = 15 seconds. Just change it to the number of seconds you want. I changed mine to 3600000 = 1 hour.

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