The War on Bad Design being started and all, I think our iPod friends should get armed. Like, to the teeth. Pretty themes and innovative functionality, easy to navigate. Now cheaper, for this little while, and you get some extra’s! Be prepared for release…
You are experiencing a deadly silence before the storm right now. The site, cocoia.com, will be home to Cocoia Labs, the portfolio of designs, various downloads and support pages, as well as your portal to all things Cocoia.
For anyone wondering what this all means past the hyping, I am rolling out some icon sets and helping some developers with new icons as well. For Leopard, we will need our trusty graphical friends to be big, very big. At least 512 pixels. So a lot of icons actually need redesigning. I see a chance to give all competition a run for their money. Let’s show OS X Tiger is still leaps forward of Linux. Let’s blow Vista’s oddball look out of the water. War has begun.
Randleaf is still progressing, albeit slowly. I’ve taken the task of doing some rough semiotics on the produce of this little program, and I am almost done making a few categories with guidelines and ‘creation flags’ that really 99% of all generated images adhere to. Uh, I could say, Randleaf is going á la carte; it’s becoming increasingly simple to define what image you want to see coming out of it.
I had proposed this analysis of Randleaf’s products to my Illustration teacher, and he accepted it as a free project, so that’s good – I can rarely ever make my personal work rhyme with my education; graphic design isn’t new media, after all, and not all media is fun to me (don’t ask me anything about video, I don’t really like it).
In the meantime, the blog’s uneasy silence is caused by the impending release of new blog styles, the Cocoia main site, and several personal projects including but not limited to improving the overall look of Mac OS X open-source utilities and my two (I’d almost say, make that three) apps. At the moment, you could say my day is getting a bit hectic with projects;
1. School work (obligatory illustrations, essays, etc.)
2. Timezones 1.0 (due May 15th)
3. CCC presentation(s) (due for submission before May 15th)
4. Daily build and troubleshoot of Praetorian and iSight Expert; I switch products as I feel like it, but admittedly, Praetorian is seeing a lot of attention as it’s data management and import had to be redone -again- when I discovered FreeRADIUS has raddb inconsistencies across versions.
5. Personal website work.
6. Other commissioned work I am not at liberty to discuss.
7. When my girlfriend’s lucky, personal work-outs for actual physique.
Busy? I feel at times, it kills me, I’ve had an incredible headache for two weeks now, which gets paralyzing at moments. Fortunately, my code is starting to make a lot more sense; I am really getting around the whole unit-testing paradigm and all my projects are seeing a lot of attention to details and cleanup. I strongly suspect the whole headache fuzz is mostly caused by a lack of rest, which I think I can do better with. Sometimes I can’t even grok my reference documents or get my mind around mentally sculpting concepts.
On a side note, the OS X spell-checker wanted to correct “FreeRADIUS” with “ferrari’s”. I suppose it has the same ring to it. I imagined actually writing an app that manages ferrari’s on your Mac, but that’s just too much fun to bear.
Okay, people, I am gearing up for the final release. I am taking ten days to do the necessary bugfixes and tweaks, and here is a preview of things to come (one of them being the very hot black theme) and the official release date announcement. Since there were also a few questions over at MacUpdate, I will answer them in this post as well.
You can download the beta here for evaluation purposes. The final version will have a demo, but it will be somewhat restricted.
Questions:
Timezones has no clear purpose. It’s no world clock. It’s no world map. What is it?
A: Cocoia Timezones was made to navigate timezones and quickly find out what time it is where. There being no open API for iPod development, the world map is made ‘interactive’ by making a series of images you can scroll though. The ‘world clock’ terminology was a mess-up from my side, and I’m sorry for that.
Why does the installer ‘phone home’?
A: It doesn’t. If you were to carefully scrutinize it, you can see the installer is fetching the first image of the installation process – namely a how-to for the installation. After that, no more connections are made, and nothing else is transferred. The internet image was embedded to later be replaced by a notice that the beta has expired and is deprecated.
(insert feature that isn’t in timezones here) isn’t in Timezones. Why?
A: There is no open iPod API for developing software.
I hope this clears it all up a bit. I hope you are enjoying the beta and look forward to perhaps a small beta update and the final release.
I thought, go download your own and see if it works out for you. I got mail from Nano users willing to test too, so hey.
This is not feature complete. Please test this for me, and give me feedback about bugs, inconsistencies, and suggestions at this address.
I wanted to make an ‘app’, of sorts, for the iPod before the week in which I got it was over. I am going to roll this out very quickly (there is still some stuff to set up, some bugs to iron out) but drop me a line, type of iPod (I need people with Color Display / Video iPods) and time zone of choice, and you can test this before it comes out! I am probably going to make this one a super-cheap donationware.