Jon Hicks and making icons.

Jon Hicks, talented designer, and renowned for the making of the Firefox and Pathfinder icons amongst others, has shared slides of his presentation on icon design. I found it an interesting look into the mind of a great designer.

IconResource delayed.

Due to problems with setting up the payment processing system, IconResource has been delayed by a week. I found this most disheartening and extremely annoying, but there’s very little I can do about this; it’s all in the hands of my payment institutions at this moment, so all I can do is wait patiently. Again, my apologies; I look forward to seeing you all when we do launch, in a week on April 2nd.

Edit; if you want to give some valued input, fill this one-question Google survey about the pricing of the pack. Your input is highly valued!

UI Candy.

I never eagerly post products from my competitors or even friends, but my designer friend Josh Pyles has released UI Candy today, a beautiful resolution-independent set of glyphs for your apps, and I found the design too good to leave unmentioned. The webdesign is remarkable and eye-catching, but that shouldn’t distract from the strong set of pictograms in the pack.

I invite you to hop over to Josh’s UI Candy site and take a gander.

Meet IconResource.

Although a bit earlier than I wanted to announce this, an inside scoop on the latest Mac Developer Roundtable forced me to put up at least something. IconResource is my biggest new project.

What’s IconResource? It’s a video series aimed at intermediate computer users (no Photoshop knowledge required), and aims to teach you about the theory and techniques of icon design. Basically, it teaches you A-Z how to make icons, directly from the source. To get a good insight into its ‘features’, visit the preliminary website.

A select amount of individuals have already been invited to ’sample’ the videos before release, and I will adhere to my March 26th release to the public. Pricing will also be announced at that time.

For now, don’t hesitate to leave your feedback on this great new endeavour Cocoia is embarking upon!

Latitude website goes live.

Latitude, my dream browser project, has now got a website. Since we now have a real team together, you can keep your eyes on this webspace for updates on this project. Of course, we are in an early stage, so please don’t ask for a tester spot yet, but we’ll update this as it goes along, with the design document and all coming up.

Bobby Andersen talks icons.

Bobby Andersen’s short talk on icon design and 3d icon design (at C4[1]) is now up on viddler, and I challenge you to watch it. Unlike Wil’s talk, it’ll consume about 20 minutes of your day - plus, you get to listen to one of the best icon designers around.

Latitude Q&A on Browsersphere.

I had some Q&A on Latitude, my Dream Browser, on Bernie Zimmerman’s site, Browsersphere. Check it out if you want to read the answers to some questions and misconceptions people have.

Let the new era begin.

Apple has just revealed the new, open Software Development Kit for the iPhone. It’s an exceptional program, which had been pre-seeded to developers. It allows developers to create native applications for the device, which had been highly desired since the start.

I was reasonably tight-lipped about this because I got a stash of email from companies a while before the keynote of today. I’ve been working on iPhone apps with developers for a few weeks now, and as such, I had been expecting a reasonably fully fledged SDK to appear. A device that already astonished people worldwide will now perform almost any desirable function, in a beautiful and revolutionary way. We truly stand at the brink of a user experience and software development revolution.

An online friend, Leonardo Cassarani, said:

Imagine something like Delicious Library’s barcode scanning on iPhones. You could read users’ reviews of the product you’re considering buying. Or auto-update your delicious library via the web. How about keeping a wishlist as you go out for shopping, maybe record the store names and addresses so you can get back to it and buy it or integrate it with something like Amazon’s wishlist?

This is a perfect example of why this is going to change a lot of things in the software industry. Not to mention, the target audience of people owning an iPhone will soon be much larger than the audience of desktop software - especially Mac software.

Although it’s not looking great for application icons, currently (the ones in the presentation were mediocre at best), you can imagine my enthusiasm about creating interfaces for all these great new applications, with a more interactive usage model than ever before. New applications are even promised a way to poll the iPhone for its location, it’s acceleration and tilt - making a game that responds to the way you hold the device an ‘obvious idea’. Where there was a limited model of development first, it seems the only boundary right now is the creativity of the designers and developers working with this.

I would say I expect to see a lot of cool apps coming out in June, but fortunately, I won’t. I know for sure that we’ll see a lot of great apps in June.

Edit: Thomas made this funny point:

Your shopping-oriented examples are really just slightly modified versions of the same hoary old “imagine if you could buy a soda..with your phone” that we’ve been hearing forever… (entire comment)

I think that if you feel this way, you’re failing to see the implications to anything in the web and desktop application spectrum today. Social networking, content exchange, collaboration, and more of such concepts in software are about to be reinvented in ways oriented at the most pleasant interaction model in existence. There’s bound to be some great rethinking of rusty conventions and repairing of broken implementations of good ideas.

Silenzio.

I’m having a silent week or two before the launch of my biggest projects. I haven’t a lot of stuff to write about either, so I don’t expect a lot of posts until March 14th. At least I can give a tiny teaser of the smallest project, which is still… quite sizeable. I plan to release a ton of stuff at once, so check back soon.

I’ll see you all when this place goes boom!