Altering the Droid theme without root?

[kalebmcc]

Is there a way to alter my Droid's theme without root or paying money? I don't want to make huge changes, just a black status bar and the removal of that faux carbon fiber mesh from the applications menu.

Any ideas?

 

[stoggy]

I just tried openhome lite and it worked on my droid, but it would occasionally pause and I got a couple force closes. Tried it for about 1 hour and got 2 force closes. Not great but not to bad. More unfortunately it would pause at weird times. couldnt really find a specific reason just sometimes it was like the phone was out to lunch.

On the other hand when it wasn't pausing it was really fast. You can set it for more then 3 screens. change themes. lots more options.

Most of my widgets that I have installed didn't show up though. some were even running but I still couldn't add them to the home screens, maybe they just didnt get added to the openhome widget list because they were already installed, so maybe reinstalling them would fix it, but the pauses and force.closes killed it for me.

More time/fixes and it will ready.

 

[stoggy]

dxtop works. this one seems the best so far, background is kinda off centered and moving around the screens take a little getting use too. it is fast, no force closes, no pauses, my widgets worked, ( demo version is called dxtop demo )

the screens are not like this:
[]-[]-[]

it depends on how you swipe: (this is kinda neat cause you can go from screen1 - screen4 in 1 swipe)
top-bottom = screen1
bottom-top = screen2
left-right = screen3
right-left = screen4


pandahome works. I saw video glitches anytime i changed anything in a theme when moving screens, default themes worked good, but seemed more in-tune for a 10 year old girl, otherwise this one was really cool. but the info page says it wont be ready for droid for 2 days... ( pandahome i used was called pandahome new~ )


ahome didnt work at all.
freshface didnt work at all. I think ahome and freshface are basically the same, both say they only work on android 1.5. You can load them and run them but they both immediately and repeatedly force close, so you have to power off and come back up.



If you try a theme manager, when you hit the home button it gives you a choice to finish with, normal home or the replacement home. You can also set 1 as the default action, I would not suggest setting a default unless you are really sure you want to use one or the other. I had to uninstall one of them to unset the default home i set. I read about "something of" a horror story for someone that made this mistake. He got it fixed but still didnt sound like fun.

On the plus side of having 2 homes running, you get 3 extra screen from the normal home. On the down side you are running an extra home that is just wasting resources if you dont use it.

 

[Breezer23]

I've tried them all at this point. Pandahome, GDE, DxTop, aHome, Open Home, etc. They are all buggy for the most part. DxTop seems to be the most stable but I don't care much for the layout/tabs. GDE has the most potential overall but in the end they are all slow after you've been running them for an extended period of time. They all eventually force close, etc.

My guess, would be to wait a few more weeks for developers to catch up and release more updates for Android 2.0.

I wish Google would release a theme creater like RIM did for Blackberry... would be quite nice.