16 May
   Filed Under: News   

It’s a first for me; I’ll be in town June 3rd – June 14th. I’m a bit too poor to actually go to the Moscone and check out sessions that are focused on developers, so I’ll just be going across town meeting people and working.

The Moscone

I got quite a few emails already from people and companies that would like to meet up; as the schedule is quickly filling up, if you’d like to connect, let me know early!

I intend to visit Japantown and North Beach more this time around. It’s my fourth time going to San Francisco, so I haven’t nearly seen enough of the awesome city that is San Francisco yet.

Are you going to WWDC? I’m taking suggestions on toy shops and great restaurants for the time that I’m over. Now that I’m 21, I can also check out more of the night life. Some sweet places I found in the past are shops like Double Punch in North Beach and Cesario’s, a pretty good Italian restaurant near Union Square.

14 May
   Filed Under: Goodies, Personal Work, Wallpapers   

The Ubiquity logo was finished in my series of ‘Inside Job‘ posts, but I think few of you have peered this deeply into the eyes of Ubiquibot, the new official logo and mascot of Mozilla LabsUbiquity.

ubiquipreview

Ubiquibot’s wallpaper comes in ‘Clean’, ‘Evil’, and ‘Good’ variants, all in glorious 2560*1600 pixel size. Enjoy!

This wallpaper is intended for personal usage and desktop customization only. Ubiquity and its identity is © 2008-2009, Mozilla.

13 May
   Filed Under: Giveaways, News   
billingssplitz

My Billings license giveaway had a great reception. A big shout out to all of you who participated on twitter, the blog, or on their own blogs; I hope you will also enjoy the set of giveaways that are coming up this year, including at least one with some actual, physical, sent-to-your-doorstep hardware!

The winners of the two licenses are Ben Jacob and Matt Farrugia. In an interesting stroke of events, the first random draw selected two Marketcircle employees as winners, but I have taken the liberty to assume that other people were more in need of a license then them :).

I also want to thank the guys at Marketcircle for lending themselves to a great interview and giving out these licenses, and I am eager to see what they’ll have in store for us in the future with improvements to Billings and iPhone applications.

Congrats to Ben and Matt, and thanks for participating!

12 May
   Filed Under: Gaming   

Since the last gaming article on Flower, one might expect a post on a relaxing and casual game, but I want to talk about Armored Core for Answer instead; the latest game in the line of the Armored Core series is everything but casual.

ac

I hadn’t played an Armored Core game before, but as a vocal mecha lover, I wanted to give it a shot after I had jumped through a bazillion hoops to make a Japanese Playstation Network account and downloaded the (also entirely Japanese) demo. I started up the game, enjoyed the horribly designed menu – a real stalwart quality of Japanese games in general – and went straight into the first mission.

I lasted about 30 seconds. I was literally blown away, mentally and ingame, by a 3000-feet (about a kilometer) high walking fortress with six long-range cannons firing projectiles the size of a bulky SUV. At that moment I realized that this was a game that was practically tailor-made for me.
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11 May
   Filed Under: Design, News   

A lot of people ask me about the ‘boring’ part of running a freelance shop, like time tracking, billing, and invoicing. My workflow is very simple, and for the last few years it has depended almost completely on one solid-as-a-rock app: Billings by Marketcircle.

billings

As a nice extra, Marketcircle’s Ryan Cash and Alykhan Jetha were kind enough to allow an interview about Billings to supplement this look at my personal workflow and share some background on the application and great upcoming things for users.

You guys can also win a Billings license – details on that at the end of this article!

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09 May
   Filed Under: Drawing, Personal Work   

As I mentioned in my Pokémon brands post, sometimes the strangest ideas hit you, and given their perceived coolness, they stick in your mental lists of weird things you should indulge in as a designer. Ever since I got my Airport Express and took it out of the box, I thought it resembled a robot head. A cyclops robot head, perhaps, but a robot head nevertheless. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the ways my hardware tools could come to life in robot form. I did a few speedpaints to see how that would look.

airpot

I know, I know, I totally promised to update weekly or at least biweekly on my tablet progress, but life’s not always easy that way. Right now, I’ll try to do something monthly, because it’s a lot of fun to do.

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