Themify is a vibrant, user-customisable theme for Rockbox. The project’s UI design is completely original, built from the ground up around the iPod and it’s users. The goal was to create an inviting and intuitive user experience for iPods, while also catering to the new wave of users who wish to customise their iPods to suit themselves.

The first version came out in March of 2023, I view it more of a prototype to the finalised Themify 2 vision that will come out in 2025. The second version took over 2 years of work, pushing the limits of Rockbox and my project management skills.

Themify 2 was my first iPod project to be led with a design-first mentality. Typically the limitations of the APIs provided by Rockbox would determine many of the decisions made on a project, however I knew that if I wanted to create a better experience for users I had to push Rockbox’s tools to their limits to achieve my goals.

The Programming for this project was intense and laborious. There are very few typical programming features available in Rockbox’s UI markup language, most often limited to simple boolean logic functions and binary yes-no checks. Still, with very creative solutions I was able to achieve incredible results.