I’ve spent a fair amount of my free time customizing my iPhone, and even though I’ll feature a theme every now and then, I thought it might be fun to gather and show all of my mods in one particular place. This isn’t a tutorial about how to achieve this look (although I’ve got a little theme modding guide coming soon), but I have included the sources for my themes and mods whenever possible.
Icon theme: Illumine
I’ve showcased this Winterboard theme on JAiB already, but I’ve also modified it a little to suit my tastes. I took various .png image files from the Illumine MacThemes thread, particularly the ones posted by pinoy408 and robone. The forum is set up in such a way that users can request images to be Illumine-ified, and then some kind soul with a photo and a shop will come back with the images formatted and resized for use in Illumine. Unfortunately, MacThemes isn’t taking any registrations and I couldn’t find a search function to look through the 223-page thread, so I just googled “illumine” alongside the app names I wanted and found my particular images that way. Modifying or adding images to an existing theme is actually easier than I thought, and I’ll be writing a quick guide about how to do so soon.
Interface theme: Matte UI
Illumine may do a great job with icons, but it doesn’t do anything for SMS pop-ups, the bottom bars of certain apps, and the various other small UI elements. That’s what I use the Matte UI 1.1 Winterboard theme for. Instead of the default blue glow, Matte gives you the impression that all of the colours and textures on the iPhone have been squashed. It’s actually a little bit of a reversal in some ways, since the pop-ups are now a transparent gray, but the “delete” and “done” buttons are more colourful than ever. I can’t say anything more about Matte except that it has worked out very nicely for me over the past few weeks.
SBSettings Theme: BlackBold
BlackBold is essentially Illumine for SBSettings, and I installed this theme right from Cydia and activated it from within SBSettings.
Skinning OverBoard to look like Orbit
As I mentioned in my Overboard vs Orbit comparison the other day, I like Overboard’s functionality, but find Orbit’s visuals a lot better. I used the “Springboard Exposé” Winterboard theme on Cydia, and then took the Illumine Orbit icon from the Illumine MacThemes thread and wrote over Overboard’s default icon.
Buying another MusicSkin
I reviewed the MusicSkins before, and I had a little bit of money left on the gift certificate they gave me, so I decided to use it all up and grab myself another one. I used an image of a lighthouse over on iDesign and added a few Bruce Cockburn lyrics from the song “Night Train”, which I was listening to at the time.
As a result, the front of my iPhone is Batman, and the back is Robin. The springboard and various other themes all have this dark undertone to them, but the back features exactly the kind of cool blue colour I loved when I was about 13 years old. I suppose if I were to wax philosophical about this, I could say that however seriously I might take the writing pieces about the iPhone platform and all of the gizmos that surround it, at the end of the day it’s still just a shiny plastic toy for a dude who never grew up…but I’m not saying that. 😛
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: Cydia, macthemes, musicskin, Orbit, Theme, Winterboard
