What would a user interface for an iPod user in the 2020s look like? Themify is a project that seeks to explore how the iPod can be redefined to suit modern users.
The iPod community today is defined by one core value: freedom. This manifests through users abandoning streaming services like Spotify, or customising their devices to be their favourite colour. I recognised a gap in the user-interface of the iPod to let them customise and adapt the experience further to suit their needs.
Themify is a fully functional piece of software. It is a user-interface for the Rockbox operating system that users put on iPods. It takes advantage of Rockbox's settings to let users set a foreground and background colour, which is then used to colour the UI.
The project has provided many opportunities to learn and grow with my design and programming skills. Themify has a dedicated fan base across the globe, regularly featuring in posts on social media, or blogs in all manners of languages.
Design Requirements
Readability was a core focus in the design process, my project compacticons came from this need for a compact, yet readable, icon set. Larger, spacious UI components were designed to provide an easily scanned visual environment.
Another key design requirement was the quality of the user experience. Much of my practice treats programming decisions as part of the design process, and in Themify many of the Ui decisions like the menus involved much programming considerations.
Accessibility and Language Support
The UI was designed with accessibility in mind. The software provides users with a configuration file to disable things like animations, which fallback to static graphics without a degradation of the experience. It also provides users the ability to disable text scrolling, eliminating any possible moving objects on screen.
The design itself is intended to be high-contrast by default, using a black-and-white colourscheme provides a high amount of readability.
Similar to accesibility, much time was spent researching language support. The iPod's limited power means font files much be quite small, leading to the creation of MicroNotoSans, a subset fork of Noto Sans that balances language support and file size.
Development Challenges
Much of what Themify does is a technical first for iPod user interfaces. Many items like it's custom menus or anti-aliased, colour-changing UI had never been acheived before. Some items like the Quicksettings menu required me to contribute embedded C code to the Rockbox project in order to make possible.
Links
Themify Website
Project Source Code