How to make custom apps to appear by default in the lower dock panel in my custom ROM At the very bottom of my device (MT6577 + ICS + TouchWiz Launcher) are the default icons for "phone", "contacts", "web", and "applications". I want to replace them with my own apps in my custom ROM so that the custom apps appear by default on the dock.

Now, the problem is for instance, I removed stock "phone" and "Contacts" apps from /system/app and copied new phone and contacts app in there. Then I created the build, flashed the ROM and rebooted. 
After reboot, the places for phone icon and contacts icon were empty.
It's like:

Before replacing the dock was - phone - contacts - web - App

After replacing the doc is -  empty - empty - web - App

Is there any specific file I need to edit to do the trick ?

Any help/suggestion would be immensely appreciated!   

Thanks.
You'll need to edit the apk for the default launcher, which in this case is TouchWiz launcher. You'll need to figure out how TouchWiz gets its default setting, my guess is it would be in some of the xml files in the /res/values/ folder for the launcher, which should make modding easier as you'll only need to extract the apk, edit the files you need, and recompress and probably resign the package but it may also be hardcoded into the code in which case you'll need to decompile, reverse engineer, and recompile the Dalvik class files in addition to the previous steps.

These are some tools that might help you do these modifications:


apktool: A tool for reverse engineering Android apk files
smali/baksmali: An assembler/disassembler for Android's dex format
jarsigner: tool to sign an apk (included in SDK)