heads up stony this will work for froyo but its a little bit harder
1. Take your systemui.apk and decompile it
2. Navigate to layout folder
3. Grab "status_bar_tracking.xml" and open it up in your editor
(now for the fun).
4. Add to the first line - "com.android.systemui.statusbar.TrackingView" add this ""android:background="@drawable/...anim.xml""
<com.android.systemui.statusbar.TrackingView androidrientation="vertical" android:background="@drawable/pulldown"...>
5. After saving that, navigate back into the drawable folder and add your animation.xml file there. (You may use the one here as a starting point, just modify for your needs. (Honeycomb goes 1 to 39 and starts over, Android goes 1 to 30 and back down again then starts over again.))
5a. Next navigate into the drawable/hdpi folder and add your animated images .
6. Also in the drawable/hdpi folder find and open up the shade_bg.png and status_bar_background.png with your editor and make it 100% transparent.
7. In values folder modify public.xml to account for all the new images. (See birgertime's thread for Public XML Helper tool, while the tool didn't give me a perfect public.xml it did give me a a basis to begin with and I only needed to change a couple of lines.)
8. Now it's time to recompile your apk , following all the usual directions with that.
9. Enjoy your newly created systemui.apk with a pretty cool animated background. new and fresh and unlike anything before. Now run on out and show it off to all your friends who own an iPhone.
FOR FROYO: Instructions are pulled word for word and I have not tested or tried. I'm assuming the steps are the same as above except using framework-res.apk instead of systemUI.apk
You need transparency hack enabled
Decompile framework-res.apk
Go to drawable-hdpi and make status_bar_background.png fully transparent with PS or GIMP
GO to layout and edit the 2nd line of status_bar_tracking.xml like this
<com.android.server.status.TrackingView android:background="@drawable/status_bar_background_animation" android rientation="vertical" android addingLeft="0.0px" android addingRight="0.0px" android addingBottom="0.0px" android:focusable="true" android:visibility="gone" android:descendantFocusability="afterDescendants"
where status_bar_background_animation links to status_bar_background_animation.xml in drawable folder, there you set the images and durations.
Recompile, and that's it. Enjoy
