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.

I’ll be in California between January 26th and February 2nd, visiting the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View and working in downtown San Francisco. If you’d like to connect, email me or hit me up on Twitter.

Head over to Aza’s blog to read his great description of the process. After thorough consideration, we chose for these irresistible blue eyes. We’re calling this the semi-final, as our official deadline was the 19th, but some polishing is yet required. It also turned out that there was no vector resource for the ‘unbranded’ Mozilla globe, so that’ll require some redrawing :).

Since I still receive a lot of comments and email about the browser project that was once started by me, called Latitude. Latitude has been discussed in depth on this blog, so I won’t spend an entire new article on it. I was really quite fond of the concepts behind Latitude, but as all the members of the team have no free time to spend on it, we have to be frank after months of inactivity and call it quits.

Continue reading…

To explain the last ‘post’; I’d like to introduce you to the linked item. It’s a tumblr-esque way of posting links to cool stuff without making a whole post. Let me know if it somehow breaks, as I’ve hacked it into WordPress myself, and I’m not much of a PHP ninja, if you know what I mean! :)