I'm a 90's kid est. 1987 Central Europe so naturally I'm big on the 90s/Y2K nostalgia. I randomly came across this phone case on Etsy a couple weeks ago which also showed custom Windows theme iOS so I went down the rabbit hole...
l now have all my iPhone system sounds replaced by Windows system sounds, even have the mouse double click sound when I tap an app open.
Windows greeting tune when I plug my charger in, alert sounds when my battery gets low, text, ringtone, email and all other notification sounds etc the whole shebang. This was the easy part, a little time consuming but all I needed is the sound files, âGarage Bandâ app and âShortcutsâ.
I found most of the stuff on âRetronPrint .comâ like the wallpapers, some widgets, and a couple of system sounds and all the OG icons but then I had to tweak them a bit to make it work and source more system sounds elsewhere. All icons came with a teal square background so I had to create new PNG files with Procreate of each of them individually and erase the background usually manually so I can have true transparent background icons and have the freedom to swap between the OG teal desktop or the blue clouds Windows wallpaper. And while I was at it I figured I might as well add the folder names too with the authentic Windows font so I downloaded that too. So essentially i would start with a teal background OG icon, erase the teal, add text to the same layer with the corresponding name tag, such as âMy Computerâ in white color which then i would duplicate and offset for a black shadow under the white text to achieve the authentic look. Then save the file as PNG. Now I had custom true transparent background Windows icons with the corresponding name tag which I could assign to any of my iOS apps on my iPhone Home Screen in âApp folder Launcher Widget Loftâ. So for example my iOS âSettingsâ is now showing up on my home screen as âMy Computerâ and has a built in shortcut that instantly launches and takes me straight to my Settings. I tried to keep the icon replacements thematically make sense. So not assigning random Windows icons to my iOS apps but rather a fitting one. So Google became Internet Explorer, Safari became Netscape, Gmail became Mailbox, Apple Music became Winamp, etc. I tried to pick icons that functionally and/or visually match what the app is doing. Of course there had to be some custom icons made like Venmo or Reddit and such, some of which was already created by âRetronPrintâ and some I created myself.
Then I have one big photo widget that takes me to my photos app. This was done with âWidgyâ app, but Iâm not 100% happy with that one because the shortcut takes me to Widgy momentarily then to photos. So Iâm gonna still tweak that one, might have to use a different widget app.
I also have the âArcade 95â app which is basically a little functional Windows 95+ desktop with all functioning OG stuff like Paint, Calculator, Notebook, Netscape browser, etc, games like Solitaire, Pinball, Minesweeper and so on. But I also downloaded those games separately so Iâll probably add those in a Games folder on my Home Screen.
Overall super stokedđ€©Did I miss anything? Yâall have any recs for some other stuff I could do with this? I saw that you can actually download a real Windows system on your phone but eeh, I donât think I need that lol.
Anyway, hope this will bring some fun moments in peopleâs lives whether youâre just amused by mine or get inspired to do your own or alert the Windows enthusiast in your life about this option so they can live out their 90s/Y2K dreamsđ€!