The future of web applications is bright. While I use Adobe’s applications a lot daily, I’m by no means a fan of their overpriced and badly designed products. That’s exactly why I am so pleased to see a product like 280North’s Atlas, a type of Xcode / Interface Builder for Cappuccino, their powerful web application framework.

Currently, very intensive, desktop-quality web applications either use Adobe’s Flash, or a very barebones interface that works using Javascript and HTML. I love the latter approach; standards compliant, plugin-less applications fills my heart with joy. It wasn’t really desktop-quality, though, and this is a huge step in the right direction.

I’d love to see web applications like Aviary’s created in this; the Flash plugin makes these great applications sadly unusable on a Mac.

After many months of working with Jon Lech Johansen (known on the internet as ‘DVD Jon’) and the other guys of the doubleTwist crew, I’m proud to announce doubleTwist for Mac has gone public today. I’ve designed doubleTwist’s icon, website, logo, and the interface together with Sean Patrick O’Brien.

doubleTwist is a great application (soon also on Windows) that aims to be for media what the browser is for the web. Got some music in iTunes and videos on Youtube you want to put on your Blackberry, or PSP? No problem, doubleTwist will handle all the details. Want to put your elaborate photo album of your last vacation on flickr, and share a select few privately with friends? doubleTwist does it.

It’s really an amazing idea for an application; you’d start to wonder why such a thing hasn’t been done before. It’s all very simple and fun to use. I suggest you check out the nice screencasts on the doubleTwist website, and download the beta. You can also see if your device works with doubleTwist.

Well, another day, another major browser beta; Safari 4 went public beta today, with a lot more UI changes and additions than we’d all expected from the limited developer preview that was released months ago.

Notably, Safari adds tabs to the top of the window (seemingly ‘aping’ Google’s Chrome, which isn’t out for Mac yet) and several new features for visual browsing (nevermind my own ‘top sites’; I haven’t used Safari for months). It sort of took me back for a second to the time where I mocked up the ‘dream browser’.

Using it casually, I found there’s also some other, more subtle changes and additions that made me really enjoy giving this beta a spin, and perhaps will sway me into using Safari a lot more (provided I can find a working Adblock extension).

Continue reading…

As promised in my last post, I’m reporting on my progress of picking up drawing and painting again with a Wacom Cintiq. A selection of speedpaints this week, with a lot of landscape exercises and one teaser of my first real client ‘painting’ work!

I haven’t really settled on a format for these weekly updates yet, so please do leave feedback on what I should and shouldn’t post. I’ve excluded most of my sketches and doodles. Techniques from painters or wanna-be-painters are of course, also welcome. For these speedpaints, no reference of any sort was used, except for the Portal speedpaint.

Continue reading…

I’ve been averse to using tablets since I got first introduced to them. Don’t get me wrong, I really love drawing stuff. I think I’ve been drawing before I learned to walk. But tablets seemed counter-intuitive. “You don’t draw in one area and look at another!”, my mind screamed. It took a lot time for me to reconsider. What really made me reconsider was something a touch more… futuristic.

The Wacom Cintiq is a pretty neat combination of an external monitor and graphics tablet. It comes in 12 and 21 inch flavours, and for the sake of digitizing my sketching and contract signing process, I’m trying it out. The 12 inch model, mind you. There’s no way I could fit one of these on my desk next to my (really) big Cinema Display. Since I’ve barely used tablets, and haven’t done drawing with colors since I was a freshman in the Academy of Arts (quite a few years ago) I’ll share some so-called ‘speedpaints’ with you every week. This way, you can follow my thoughts on getting used to such an interesting piece of hardware and see the results.

Continue reading…

Being in the Bay Area last week was great, as always. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the city of San Francisco, spending most of my time in its downtown area. The big highlight of my trip, however, was being in Mountain View at Mozilla’s offices.

I’ll share some of my impressions from the trip – I even brought home some nice loot. Also read on to check out some great websites and blogs of the people I met.

Continue reading…