It’s always a huge leap for a designer to come up with designs for a platform you’re not familiar with. I remember feeling extremely uncomfortable at first when I designed my first iPhone icons and interfaces, and while the iPad was a logical extension of the iPhone UI, it still felt like a significant step to take.

Imagine how I felt when I was sitting at my desk, Nexus One in one hand and pen in the other, after being asked to design doubleTwist’s media player for Android. Android doesn’t have a very nice media player in terms of design (I’m carefully picking my words here – I don’t want to offend the undoubtedly hard working people at Google) and it was easy to just go the way some developers go: make an iPhone app, shoehorn it into Android, and call it a day.

We wanted something that actually advanced the state of the art. I sure as hell wasn’t going to use an entirely new platform for months just to ape another. It was a mixed blessing to have so little limitations on what constituted a ‘native’ user interface.

Android has its guidelines, but most apps (even the Google-sanctioned Twitter app) have a very ‘custom’ appearance. We opted for a look that works well on the various devices and custom ‘shells’ (notably, HTC’s terrible “Sense” interface) and arrived at this muted, native-looking yet polished visual scheme, which also helps users navigate the app in direct sunlight, where OLED screens like the Nexus One’s tend to be hard to read. Subtle usage of textured surfaces in the application also help prevent color banding on the color-limited OLED screens.

I’m happy to have this in the hands of Android users. It’s sometimes depressing to read comments on tech websites of people exclaiming: “Why would you even care about how a media player looks or works? You play music and turn off the screen!”, but I am sure there’s a lot of people who will appreciate the thought and details that went into this app. And that makes it all worth it.

The player is available on the Android Marketplace for free for a limited time.

In August last year, I decided to hold a limited sale period for Icon Resource, since I was about to upgrade it with new content for existing members. I like giving people free upgrades whenever possible: Icon Resource was always meant to be an ongoing project, and it still is. However, it’s taking longer than expected to roll out the new websites. It’ll certainly be worth the wait, though!

Here’s a brief a look at the new Icon Resource – and its new brother, iPhone Resource. There’s something new for previous and new members in the works, but I’m not ready to release it yet. This only means that there’ll be that much more content for you if you’re a member: two entirely new courses on Mac / Windows icon design, including intermediate and advanced techniques.

iPhone Resource, a separate and new set of courses, focuses on making amazing iPhone icons and interfaces. It’s shorter and more concise than its big brother, but from what I’ve seen in the App Store, it’s certainly sorely needed.

You will also get a brand new member area, where you can watch course videos, review lessons and download files. An iPhone application is also in the works, but I can’t tell much about that yet. It’ll be released a bit later than the actual upgrade.

Much design love went into this new version, and all pages have been redesigned from the ground up. The new login page went through over a hundred iterations. Click on the image to view it at full size on Flickr.

I expect to roll out the entire new Icon Resource upgrade in late February or March. As an existing member, you will be notified by email (and only this time! I hate newsletter spam) when the new content arrives. The price will remain unchanged.

It’s official: I never had as much giggles in an evening designing this poster for Cocoaheads WWDC. Scott asked me if I’d like to speak at the well-known Mac developer event, and I happily obliged. I also did a bit of poster art for the presentation screen and for, well, fun.

The lineup of speakers:

• Delicious Monster‘s Wil Shipley
• 280 North‘s Francisco Tolmasky
•  Dirk Stoop from Sofa
• Joachim Bondo of Cocoa Stuff
• and me. Perhaps an excellent chance to give away a shirt?

.

It’ll be held Wednesday June 10th, 7-9PM, at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco.

I’m really looking forward to WWDC this year. Hope to see you all at Cocoaheads or elsewhere during the week!

And yes, those are little Xcode hammers in the smoke.

As I alluded to earlier today, Sean Patrick O‘Brien and I are working on the very first Mac application that will be released under the Cocoia ‘brand’: Composition. Composition allows you to take any image and get a pixel-perfect preview of iPhone’s default effects at regular home screen size and Settings/Spotlight small icon size. It also lets you look at your icon in a virtual home screen to achieve a native look (and yes, both iPhone and iPod touch home screens will be represented), and export it for further usage on websites and other materials.

Composition is not an icon generator or designer in any way; it is made for people who care about the way their icons look, and want to get a break from the horrible workflow of mashing previews of icons together in Photoshop. There will be several easy-to-access Photoshop templates accessible from the app, but the actual design work is left to applications that are excellent at that kind of work. It will also be completely free!

I will announce more news about it as the application nears the beta milestone; in the mean time, drop an email to this address to get a spot on the list.

My 21st birthday is a few days away. Contrary to the previous years, where I posted on my birthday and occasionally reflected on the past, the way I live and work today is far more oriented towards what is yet to come, and as such I won’t do that again this year. 2008 was a great year for me, and 2009, so far, has not been any different. I won’t be posting about my birthday on April 29th; instead, I’ll be posting some new downloadable goodies on that date. For now, I want to look forward; there’s a pretty elaborate schedule ahead.

Apart from small and large clients that have booked my time, I’ll be in San Francisco in June for WWDC – with no conference ticket; I am really not doing so well that I can pay a whopping 1300 dollars for some days of networking with people, although I do intend to meet up with as many of you as I can – and the Fall season will involve one or more trips to Japan and possibly other asian countries. I also hope to show off some great work I have done in the last few months in May / June.

Regarding Asia, I am not sure why, but my Japanese (and Chinese) website traffic has been increasing tremendously (こんにちは!), and I have gotten a lot more Japanese clients as well. Perhaps my learning Japanese has something to do with it, although I haven’t talked about that a lot; Japanese culture fascinates me, and I am pleased with being able to get closer to it. I’ll probably be showing off some videos of my work for Japanese companies in the Fall of 2009.

And then there’s this blog. While my writing dwindled a bit under the stress of some extended projects, I will be finishing a lot of blog posts in the next weeks. I will preview the next version of Icon Resource (new course material is free for existing members), release a small new icon set, and talk about iPhone icons and the iPhone OS 3.0′s new color profile, which I have investigated. I will also publish an article about my own billing and accounting workflow complete with an interview with the guys that provide my top billing solution: Marketcircle, and, best of all, several nice software (and hardware) giveaways are coming up.

Due to this, I’m now also entering a partnership with the cool guys at Fusion. I have never considered advertising on my blog, but Fusion has a beautiful format and shows products I use and love as well. I think it’d also suit the blog and your sensibilities as a reader. Your input on this is of course welcome. I hope you enjoyed this peek at what’s in the pipeline!

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.