Hey, I'm Zane 👋

Themed

Individuality, expression, and personality are a core component of the human experience. Our mobile devices can also be an expression of who we are. That’s why Themed was created: to allow people to find, discover, and create app icon themes that suit their personality.

The development of Themed has been an ongoing passion of mine — it’s one of my favorite projects to work on. Over the course of the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of watching  the app gain thousands of users who impress me daily with their talent. I’m so proud of Themed, it reached #15 on the App Store Graphic Design charts, earned a feature, and gave me a 2020 Top Developer award on App Airport.

Themed has taught me so much about what it means to be a designer, programmer, entrepreneur, and learner. I built an entire system via Stripe to accept payments and payout to designers — something I couldn’t have even dreamed of a year ago. I’ve had to struggle to get my app into people’s hands with no capital for marketing. And lastly, I’ve had to integrate feedback from users. All of this has pushed me like nothing else before.

Breeze

Breeze reimagines social media by turning it into a tool to facilitate real-world communication. Breeze allows you to create parties, which are akin to chatrooms, but for real-world hangouts, parties, and events. Having a party at your house? Create a party, invite some friends, and post whatever you want as it’s going on. Here’s the awesome thing: if you’re in a party, all of your friends can see it, and if any of your friends are in a party, you can see theirs. See a party that you want to be a part of? Ask to join it. Want to talk to your friend? Create a private chat. Want to remember what you did last night? Check the party. Want to meet new people? Join a party.

Breeze is my solution to a problem far too many people face. Modern social networks aim to distract us from the real world — they ironically render us more antisocial. Countless times, I’d be hanging out with my friends only to realize we were all glued to our phones. We were all physically together, but might as well have been a thousand miles apart. For this reason, I created Breeze, which aims to facilitate real world communication, rather that distract from it.

Deca5

Deca5 (pronounced “Decaf”) is a GUI tool to downgrade and jailbreak A5 devices. It was built with three things in mind: user-experience, performance, and reliability. Deca5 is unique, it is built entierly using Swift, SwiftUI, and C — it is built for modern versions of Mac OS. Moreover, much attention was given to the tool’s design, look, and feel. And of course, Deca5 fully open source — anyone can feel free to modify the tool to their liking.

Building Deca5 was the fruition of what can only be described as a multi-year quest. For years, I’ve been interested in reverse engineering, mainly to better understand how devices function. This merged with my love of legacy iOS devices to produce Deca5. The contraction of the tool was an intriguing adventure for me — to say the least. It required combining my iOS app dev skills in Swift and SwiftUI with my knowledge of C, ARM ASM, and OBJ-C.

OldOS

OldOS is the most impressive project I have ever worked on. So far, it has garnered 500,000+ downloads and has been featured on sites such as The Verge, Cult of Mac, Daring Fireball, Mashable, and many more. It reached #1 on GitHub trending and has become a full-on community project. OldOS also spawned the OldOS Project — an endeavor determined to preserve works of the past and educate on modern technologies.

What is OldOS?

OldOS is a testament to the days of yesteryear, showcasing what iOS once was ten years ago. The ethos of the app is to merge the technologies of today with a pixel-perfect recreation of the user experience of the past. The vast majority of apps in OldOS are fully functional — meaning they seamlessly integrate with the data on your phone to deliver a live, emulator-esque experience. What does this mean? Well, you can play your music in iPod, get directions in Maps, surf the web in Safari, view the current weather in Weather, and much more. By the same token, no shortcuts were taken in fully fleshing out the operating system. You can change your background, adjust settings, search apps, et cetera. There are a few apps still not ready for primetime but don’t worry, they’re coming soon.

With OldOS, you no longer need to worry about securing a legacy iPhone to experience nostalgia — it’s available on your daily driver.

Part of the goal with OldOS is to enable anyone to understand how iOS works and demonstrate just how powerful SwiftUI truly is. For that reason, the entire app is open-sourced — enabling developers to learn about, modify, and add to the app. I thought building this over my last six or so months in high school and sharing it with the world would be a fun and productive endeavor.

See it on GitHub.