Abstract Summer Notes theme

My First Cydia Theme

You may remember several years ago that iOS was much more restrictive than what it is today. Many of us used to jailbreak our iDevices in order to bypass Apple's walled-garden approach to apps. I jailbroke my old iPod Touch back in 2010 and installed many cool tweaks and themes from the jailbroken App Store called Cydia. In 2012, I decided that I would make my own theme for iOS and put it in Cydia, like the many that I had downloaded from others.

I made a few themes for jailbroken iPhones through high school. One theme made iBlanks (a tweak that essentially created invisible app icons on the home screen), show a different default message when tapped. I called it iBlank Coolifier. Another theme I made, let you put “Surprised Pat” in the corner of your home screen (made after the meme took off). I made another theme called Clean Splatters that made the then-skeuomorphic iOS look a little more flat (it wasn't the best of themes). I made another theme called Abstract Summer and it was my first and most successful jailbreak theme.

I made my first theme freely available to download in the Cydia store in the Summer of 2012. It was a theme for the default Notes app. It wasn't the prettiest of themes, but it was definitely unique and received more than 8000 downloads. Abstract Summer is still available under the ModMyi repository for those who want to check it out. While you can view it, you can only use it if you have iOS 5 and under. You can also check out my blog post about the theme at my old Tumblr blog: Dose of Nerd.

Before and After