Notification Toggle on HTC Desire (Evervolv Turba 3.0.0p10 custom ROM by Nikez Lente)

First of all, I must say that I was excited when I found there were quite a few Jelly Bean (JB) custom ROM for my HTC Desire!

I first flashed the ROM by Vijendrahs (https://sites.google.com/site/androidromporting/downloads) as I have enjoyed the MIUI ROM. Unfortunately, my joy did not last very long as I soon discovered that everything works perfectly except for GPS. I have use Waze daily and so when it could not get my location (waze kept on showing me that I am somewhere in Ecuador and not Malaysia!), I got very frustrated. Tried also the AOKP ROM ported by Vijendrahs and it was the same problem.

Thus this was what triggered me to look for other JB ports, since I have nothing to loose. I come to accept that some things may not work on alpha/beta builds and I can live with it. So I found the ROM by Nikez Lente (http://nikez.nu/releases/). At first, I wasn't quite happy with it as I was so used to features offered by MIUI ROMs. So I nandroid the phone and restore back to MIUI ICS by Marange. Only then I realised that the ICS ROM was very much slower in response and everything seems to lag. I have forgotten that I use to have so many "App not responding" messages in ICS while I get none of it in ALL the JB build.

I then decide that I should restore the ROM by Nikez and get used to it. I must say that this ROM is very responsive and other than known issues, I find that it performed better than anything I had before!

Now, one thing I missed is that I can toggle wifi, mobile data and GPS via the notification bar. I believe it was purposely removed from this build, but it is so useful I started to find if there are any apps out there that could overcome this lack. And I did find some very nice apps, but among them all, "Notification Toggle" fits my needs the best. It may not have the best icons, but I can customize my own icons if I choose to. I can even download via another app built by the same developer. While design was something I can ignore, I was really annoyed that I can't toggle my GPS directly. The developer did mention that as long as my app is installed as a user app, it will only pull out the location settings and not toggle the GPS directly. I would need to move the apk to /system/app if I fix that.

Now comes the problem. Since the internal memory of HTC Desire is so small, I needed to use A2SD script to move all my apps to the SDCard so that I have more space to install more apps. So the conventional way of copying/moving the apk from /data/app to /system/app was impossible. It failed when I use ES Explorer. When I use command line (via Terminal Emulator), the error message was "out of memory".

I was at my wits end when and idea struck. If I can only make the app installable via a zip file, then I can install it like how I install my gapps. So I downloaded app2zip and zip up the app for Notification Toggle. Sadly, it installs back to my user app space.

Then, I figure that if zip a system app, I can restore it back to my /system/app. So I got my colleague to help me install all the necessary app in his SGS1:
1. Notification Toggle
2. /system/app mover
3. app2zip

I get him to move the Notification Toggle to /system/app (using /system.app mover) and create the zip file (via app2zip). Once the zip file is created, I get him to send me the zip file to be installed via clockworkmod recovery like how ROMs are being flashed and how gapps are installed.

Voila! Now Notification Toggle is a system app! I can now toggle GPS directly via the notification bar and no longer need to go via the location settings page! :)

Installing custom ROM MIUI

After rooting the phone, now to install a custom ROM. There were many reviews on various ROM and so far, I have tried MIUI (did not bother testing others... MIUI did not give me a reason to leave, anyway :p)

Before you do anything "real" in wiping your current phone clean, it is always good to do backups. After all due diligence (backup contacts, pictures, music, SMSes, and whatever sort of data that is deemed important), you also may want to do a NAND backup of your stock ROM as well, in case you decided to revert back. To do this, I think the steps provided at http://theunlockr.com/2010/02/06/how-to-backup-and-restore-your-android-phone/ is quite complete.

So, to do the custom ROM installation:

1. First, download the ROM from http://miuiandroid.com and take a look at the list of supported device (for me, I download the ROM for HTC Desire).

2. Then, copy the the zip file of the ROM to the SD Card

3. Boot the phone into Recovery.

4. Wipe the data clean (both the user data (factory reset) as well as cache)

5. Install the "update" from SD Card.

Done!

* Sorry not able to put sample pictures here as this is a quick update.