A user asked me to post some instructions on how to edit some cube arts from another thread. So instead of going off topic there I decided to redirect the post to this thread. Musicman did a great job explaining the technical side of things, I thought I might give some suggestion to the graphical side. See attached for my current 6 sided cube:
1) Go here to get the bmp to brn converter:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...93#post1687493
2) get your icons at
http://www.iconshock.com/web-icons.php
3) Then use any graphic software to scale the image to 105x105 or smaller depending on how big you want the graphic to be. You should use something that can handle layering, like Gimp or Photoshop. Windows Paint will NOT work.
4) enlarge the canvas size to 119x105 (keeping the image intact), center the image on canvas
5) put anything else (text, additional graphics) on its own layers
6) Here is the tricky part. Because brn/bmp cannot handle transparency, you have to cut up the background to exact coordinate and paste to the back of your icons. To make matters worse, Windows will overlay all 6 of your images on top of another background image AL_Bkgd.brn, spacing each icons a couple pixels apart. So you have to make sure EVERYTHING line up perfectly. If any has a better way of doing this I'm all ears.
Once you have a 240(W) x 320(H) (or slightly bigger) background art ready, make a slight transparent by adjusting the opacity, this will be your AL_Bkgd.brn. Then cut it up as follow:
1 2
3 4
5 6
Icon 1 - 0,0 to 119, 105
Icon 2 - 240, 0 to 121, 105
Icon 3 - 0,107 to 119, 212
Icon 4 - 240, 107 to 121, 212
Icon 5 - 0,214 to 119, 319
Icon 6 - 240, 214 to 121, 319
The space in between the icons is because TouchFlo will leave a couple pixels between the 6 icons so that the AL_Bkgd.brn will show up a little (how annoying).
EDIT: According to Musicman, if you make the icons fill up the entire screen, the background won't show up at all. So that means:
Icon 1 - 0,0 to 120, 107
Icon 2 - 240, 0 to 121, 107
Icon 3 - 0,107 to 120, 214
Icon 4 - 240, 107 to 121, 214
Icon 5 - 0,214 to 120, 320
Icon 6 - 240, 214 to 121, 320
(I have not tested this out)
6) Paste whatever you cut up to the back of each of your corresponding icon.
7) export all your images to bmp. You should now have 6 icons and 1 background images.
8 ) convert to brn
9) copy to Windows/ folder, configure Cube to use those images. You may or may not want to make a seperate icons for when they are hightlighted.
Chances are you might be off by a pixel or 2. In that case go back and adjust the icons that are off. Also I have not taken the time to make the animated images which display when the cube rotates. But basically you need to scale the images along the Y axis. But they appear so fast anyway most ppl don't really notice. If I ever get around to do it I will post it here as well.
All in all this was more painful than it really should be. Again if anyone has a better way to do this I'm all ears.