The other day I noticed that there was no LDPI icon for the CMStats application in CyanogenMod 7. CMStats is the application which pops up after a fresh install asking you if you want to opt in to anonymous usage statistics. Because stats are important*, we don’t want to scare users into clicking “no” with an ugly, fishy-looking notification!

Before and after

Where before there was an ugly generic icon, there is now a beautifully-scaled CyanogenMod logo (top left). Behold!

This earth-shattering change was achieved by issuing the following magic commands:

cd ~/android/system
repo start cmstats_ldpi packages/apps/CMStats/
cd packages/apps/CMStats/
convert -resize 36x36 res/drawable-hdpi/icon.png res/drawable-ldpi/icon.png
git add res/drawable-ldpi/icon.png
git commit -m "CMStats: Add icon for LDPI"
repo upload

After that it’s all history: I am now famous. The CyanogenMod maintainers quickly noticed my important contribution and approved it.

Seriously?

Yes! But seriously, submitting patches to open source projects should be this easy. Even you can submit patches; things like documentation, build scripts, and incorrectly-sized images are all viable patches… you don’t have to rework some complicated algorithm in order to contribute!

*Importance of stats

I urge all CyanogenMod users to opt in to the stats because it helps developers (and users!) understand how users are using CyanogenMod by breaking down the data by device, CyanogenMod version, country, etc. The stats are public, btw: stats.cyanogenmod.com.

I looked today and saw that there are 1,395 users of CyanogenMod on the Huawei U8150. Yesterday the number was slightly less than that. Pretty cool.