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The iPhone 3GS look is built from layered contrast: a translucent gloss over a sharply divided gradient, dark edging, an inner highlight, and embossed text. Timon Franke’s 3GS UI project turns that visual recipe into a React component library, with semantic CSS tokens for switching themes and custom interaction logic for controls such as its picker and keyboard. It is a web recreation, not a native iOS port.

The CSS recipe for a glossy 3GS button

In his September 24, 2026 DEV Community post, Timon Franke describes the button as a stack of separate visual layers. The gloss is not simply a brighter body gradient: it sits above the button surface and fades away near the midpoint. The body gradient changes sharply at about 50%, giving the surface its glass-like break.

.gs-button {
  border: 1px solid #111;
  background:
    linear-gradient(
      to bottom,
      rgba(255, 255, 255, .30) 0%,
      rgba(255, 255, 255, .12) 50%,
      transparent 51%
    ),
    linear-gradient(
      to bottom,
      #4da9e8 0%,
      #1686d0 49%,
      #0872bb 50%,
      #3298dc 100%
    );
  box-shadow:
    inset 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, .8),
    0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, .45);
  text-shadow: 0 -1px rgba(0, 0, 0, .45);
}

The color values above are an illustrative implementation of the described layers, not a verbatim source listing. Tune them to the component’s size and palette; keep the transition between the body’s middle stops abrupt rather than smoothing it into one continuous blend. Franke’s explanation is that this discontinuity is what makes the surface read as glass.

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Give the pressed state its own surface

For an active button, Franke removes the shine layer and replaces it with a darker body gradient and an inset shadow. That treatment makes the control appear depressed; reducing opacity alone would fade the whole element, including its text and outline, rather than changing the surface.

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Use semantic tokens to support themes

Instead of assigning literal colors inside every component, the library composes CSS custom properties. Raw tokens retain literal roles; semantic tokens describe intent, such as a neutral surface, a bar button, or text on a bar. Components consume the semantic values, which a theme can override.

Franke says an early attempt to remap raw “dark” tokens made surfaces that were meant to stay dark turn pale. The correction was to leave literal raw tokens stable and change semantic tokens for the theme. The repository documents a default dark theme and a classic light blue-gray option activated with data-theme="light". Text embossing changes direction for the light theme, while tab bars, alerts, HUDs, and popovers remain dark in both.

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These are the two themes described by the project, not a general guarantee that every component has an independent theme switch.

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Install and apply the React library

The project’s GitHub README describes 3GS UI as a React design system using TypeScript and plain CSS tokens. Its example installs the package and icon dependency, imports the stylesheet, and scopes the library styles to a subtree:

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pnpm add @3gs/ui lucide-react
import "@3gs/ui/styles.css";

export function App() {
  return (
    <div className="gs-root">
      {/* Place 3GS UI components here */}
    </div>
  );
}

React 18 and 19 are identified in the project description. For the classic light appearance, apply data-theme="light" to the relevant themed subtree as documented in the README. Check the repository’s current instructions before adopting a specific package version: its component table identifies v0.1.0, but the repository is mutable.

Where the implementation needs more than CSS

Franke reports 23 React components, ranging from navigation bars to an on-screen keyboard. The project README’s inventory also includes buttons, fields, lists, alerts, sliders, pickers, modal sheets, status bars, badges, and other familiar interface elements. The difficult parts are often the interactions that make a control feel right, not just its surface styling.

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Switch: move the labels beneath a fixed knob

The switch uses a strip twice as wide as its track, with ON and OFF colors and labels on the strip. The strip slides beneath a fixed silver knob; clipping the track hides the departing label at the edge. This division of moving and stationary layers creates the sliding effect without moving the knob with the text.

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Picker: coordinate scrolling and selection

The picker uses a vertical scroll-snap wheel, 44-pixel rows, spacer rows that let end values reach the center, and shading overlays to suggest a curved cylinder. A programmatic selection can cause a scroll event, while a user scroll can update the selected value. Franke says the implementation ignores scroll events for 150 ms after a programmatic scroll to avoid the two update paths fighting each other. Those are project-specific implementation values, not universal picker requirements.

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Keyboard: preserve focus while handling pointer input

The on-screen keyboard includes shift and caps lock, delete auto-repeat, and an enlarged key popup. Its pointer-down handlers call preventDefault() so tapping a key does not blur the input before the key action runs.

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What the URL-to-phone showcase does—and does not do

The project’s showcase accepts a public URL and presents extracted page structure in a navigable phone-style view. According to Franke, a serverless function extracts elements such as titles, icons, navigation, headings, body text, prices, FAQs, and forms. Tabs and rows can lead to real pages, and forms remain editable. The project also describes detecting repeated feed rows, including on table-based pages.

This is a structural rendering rather than a guarantee of a faithful screenshot or full browser execution. Pages that render their content in client-side JavaScript may look sparse because the returned HTML contains little readable content; some sites block the request altogether.

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The author reports safeguards including DNS re-resolution at each redirect, blocking loopback, private, link-local, CGNAT, and IPv4-mapped IPv6 equivalents, a read cap, an eight-second timeout, and IP-based rate limiting. The README describes a 4 MB read cap. These are project-described controls, not an independent security audit or proof that arbitrary-URL fetching is immune to server-side request forgery.

Project scope, size, and license

Franke reports approximately 22 kB of gzipped JavaScript and 27 kB of gzipped CSS, and describes lucide as the library’s one dependency. These are author-reported project figures, not independently measured bundle results; the README’s install example names lucide-react. The repository identifies the project as MIT licensed and links its live showcase and npm package. The library and showcase are useful starting points for a retro web interface, but the author characterizes the result as a caricature rather than a port of iOS.

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