That's one other thing that I am worried about... battery life decreasing.
How do you make it winterboard-friendly? Care to explain, please?
It has to do with the icons for the apps. In summerboard mode you just put all the icons in a folder called "Icons", with each one named the app name. This takes a bunch of processing power.
With Winterboard, you have to do a little work. But the end result is fast speeds, and no battery issues.
Basically Winterboard uses bundles to replace the icons. These are folders in the Bundles folder of the theme you are using. You have to locate the bundle name of each app, create a folder with that exact name, and place the icon you want to replace in each folder, named exactly what the app calls it in its folder (usually icon.png. Also Icon.png, and then some crazy ones like iphone_icon_5x57.png. Case matters.). Luckily a file makes this process easier. It's called IconState.plist, and is located in var/mobile/library/springboard/. Open it, and it will give you all the bundle names for your installed apps. This makes folder creation much easier.
A lot of work? Yeah. It is. For me it was worth it, because I got back about an hour of usage time.
If you dont care about icons, and just want to theme lockscreens, chat bubbles, UI elements..anything but icons...you can turn off summerboard mode with no worries.
Hope this helps
Example of some of the folders I created:
