Wireshark replacement icon gets a Daily Deviation.

I’m honoured to present my third ‘Daily Deviation’ award on the biggest digital art site on the internet, deviantART. My replacement icon for Wireshark has gotten this beauty and I didn’t even notice until I had a gazillion messages and referrals to my website. Thanks for the kind words and downloads, everyone! If you want to download it, go to Icon Designer.

Link to the deviation in question…

I haven’t been very verbal lately and I couldn’t because I have had some life-changing moments that really need some thought. Perhaps I’ll divulge or make a long post about it a bit later on but at the moment, I’m really having some questions with utmost relevance about my future, my life in general, and well, what you are presented with here, my company, my idea, my ambitions. As I have said before, July will turn out an exciting month, but I can assure you it’ll be more of a rollercoaster to me and even more of a complete astonishment to you (or perhaps not, I just hope so). So, more updates soon… there has been huge progress in my work, and in my life. There’s certainly no lazy silence here. Not ever.

When everyone starts designing interfaces…

This kind of stuff happens.

Now, I’ve always been an open-source enthousiast. I’ve applauded the decision of the GNOME team to keep most of their decisions behind closed doors and not really take all the crazy feature suggestions serious. KDE 4, for some reason or another, thought it was a great idea, UI-wise, to just slap about 3 buttons on each icon on your desktop as you hover over it. Other than being brightly colored, they are quite nondescript. If this blog post wouldn’t exist, I’m quite sure very few people would know what it does. In the screen-cast you can actually see the person in question opening a file by clicking a badge over the icon with a gear on it. Oh, of course - if we click on gear icons in UI’s, files open. A totally logical piece of causality that commonly accepted.

Okay, I hear you say, it’s not even done yet; he’s just made it to show what it can do! Well, in that case, fantastic job regressing in the history of UI design. We’ve been doing everything possible to limit nondescript buttons and too much choice in the UI on the Mac; it’s in our interface guidelines. GNOME has been doing a great effort to keep it as simple and minimal as possible. What do these guys do? They just liberally sprinkle badges all over existing icons, that were meant to serve the function of the badges in the first place.

If you still think this is a good idea, you might imagine taking this step in OS X. Imagine you open Mail.app, and in the list of emails, every email is preceded by four brightly colored dots. It’s not really clear what function they have, but it seems you know because some icons on the dots seem familiar. You click the orange one and your email is suddenly gone. What happened? Well, your choice for a compact list view made the icon on the orange dot illegible and it was the button that marked it as trash. You go to your trash, where you click the green dot, and it opens a reply template. You can imagine the problems with such colored dots in small sizes.

UI design is a great job. You can think up all sorts of awesome stuff and these days, we have 3d interface possibilities for the willing. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should just do everything you can imagine because you think it’s cool. The reason why people like me are hired is that we weigh every possible user in. The same reason why the GNOME team is often criticized for being overly conservative when it comes to UI additions. KDE’s been known, to me, as the desktop with the ‘in progress’ cursor of a bouncing object and it’s XP-like icon sets. It’s never been usable, pretty, or otherwise impressive to me. This addition adds to that.

The comments on digg do make me smile. I loved this one;

” I wonder when the apple fanboys will raid this and clam they stole it from apple. sigh”

Somehow, I doubt they will.

Icon Designer updated, notes on it’s future..

Icon Designer, the place for your desktop customisation and icon services, has gotten to version two.

Go check it out, and tell me what you think. There’s still a few minor issues with the overly spacious bottom and the page being really all-image, but that’s what I do best. Sorry, I can’t really make a lot of time free to get this into a ‘real’ website, but I do want to share with you all. New is a Macbook Pro icon, Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s MagicHat icon, and the announcement that there will soon be some more cool client work. It will also provide you with details on how to get the upcoming ‘Military’ icon set, celebrating the successful ending of the War on Bad Design.

While I was considering a small sneak preview of Cocoia Main, I think this will do for now. Enjoy, all Macbook Pro users, and all you others; check in for the icon sweetness around the end of this month!

Something’s brewing and you know it.

I have been struggling to get out a few more blog updates in my busy schedule lately. I am wrapping up this term at the Academy the 20th (that’s in a few days, yes) and after that, I’m going to have a lot to consider.

Anyway, I’m up to stuff, as you might have figured out by now. Apart from having some social obligations and things to do, I’ve got quite some client work rounded up lately and I’ve also gotten a few new requests for proposals. So, naturally, a new Icon Designer is in the works!

This and much more fancy graphics in the next few days. I might even get around to posting a preview of the new Cocoia website, which is really… well, the concept left me speechless, but as it’s looking now, it’s going to be incredible.

Also: taking some requests on what icons need replacement in the ‘military’ icon set. Let me know what icon you’d like to have a new look most (can be any icon, preferably not of a third-party)

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The announcement.

Dear people. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen yet another step in the growth of Cocoia and I have decided to outline it’s growth and the upcoming projects in a presentation. There are some big things coming up, and so, it’s now official. See how far Cocoia has come and what we’re quickly approaching.

If this is in any way unusable to you, let me know. It’s a Quicktime slideshow.

Click here to download and view fullsreen.

Randleaf goes with the flow.

I really, really can’t stay behind if even the Finder decides to use Coverflow. So I decided to add a coverflow interface to a project; Randleaf, the OpenGL abstract graphics generator has been command-line for a while, so I am working on getting it a bit fancy enough for public demo’ing. This really clicks into the great announcement I will be making today, so stay tuned.

Big announcements today.

Stay tuned for a lot of Cocoia news later today. Current local time is 11:25, in the morning. In the next 12 hours, a selection of things will unwrap.

Leopard ‘Universe’ wallpaper.

Just a treat. Enjoy this Leopard wallpaper as a gift from Icon Designer ;).

Thanks for the downloads! This image has seen about 6000 downloads since it’s inception two days ago, and I’ll make a version without the ‘mess’ behind it for release soon.

Juicy Leopard Security details on Apple.com

The new Apple Leopard page lists a specific tab under “Technology” about security. Some interesting points are there, and I must say, some promising developments on this front.

We’ve seen the sandbox daemon in the Leopard preview builds, but while I pointed out that there were some default services running that were subject to exploitation, it seems Leopard will have some protection to these ‘problems’. From the Apple site:

“Helper applications in Leopard — including the network time daemon and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed to guard against attackers.“

Now that’s a good improvement. But there’s more.

“…files downloaded using Safari, Mail, and iChat are screened to determine if they contain applications. If they do, Leopard alerts you, then warns you the first time you open one.”

There’s one less avenue for malicious content being automatically opened. Given the track record of Mac users buying the upgrade of their favorite OS, we’ll see a lot more secure population in October. But wait, there is, indeed, one more thing.

“Leopard can use digital signatures to verify that an application hasn’t been changed since it was created.”

Why of course it can! After all, didn’t it use ZFS? Which does has the ability to checksum everything. We can also use Filevault, which isn’t really discussed on the Apple site, but uses a new encryption scheme, of which details are unknown at the time of writing. Fortunately;

“The Disk Utility tool in Leopard helps you create encrypted disk images using 128-bit or even stronger 256-bit AES encryption.”

And Apple Mail already supports signing certificates and authorities. This is getting a great OS for using the many facilities of securing your digital life. Strong new encryption possibilities are great. On Apple’s security page, they underline their commitment to keeping the kernel open-source, which, in my opinion, is also a critical part of the security and integrity of OS X.

That was it for now. If some of my fellow developers come back, I’ll have the penetration tests on the beta ready for everyone.

Well, that sucked.

I must say, that’s been a huge disappointment. So far, I have complained over every occurrence of the new standard at Apple to make UI captions in capital letters (see the iTunes sidebar), and some hardware trouble, but this is just insane.

I hope Steve is making a joke when he said that they had figured out a ’sweet solution’ to development on the iPhone. It’s quite clear that making AJAX apps isn’t a solution at all. I’m extremely, extremely disappointed to hear that Apple is panicing so far as to deny even widgets to run on the iPhone (although we don’t know all it’s features yet, they’d probably say Dashcode is the IDE to go if that was the case). Obviously, the device will get hacked one way or another - but what do you think? Steve Jobs has just disappointed all developers on the starting keynote of the whole WWDC. Great job, I think that’s a first.

Think of everything we could have done; multi-touch image editors, interactive games, the most cool stuff you can imagine on the new multi-touch platform won’t become reality. We’ll have to rely on just Apple for the creation of apps.