Cream of the App Store crop.

Just under 20 hours before the official release of the new iPhone 3G, Apple’s opened the doors to the App Store. A lot of great apps are already available, and I wanted to share my selection of fantastically designed and useful apps that you can grab when you update your current iPhone (or even better, get a new 3G iPhone).

All of these applications are linked to the iTunes Store, so click the link to proceed to their iTunes page with screenshots and other information.

Continue reading Cream of the App Store crop….

Faster than Light; making the Hyperspaces icon.

I’m a big fan of virtual desktops. Essentially, they expand your working field by providing more ’screens’ to distribute your windows over. In Tiger, when Leopard’s Spaces application wasn’t in the picture, there were several solutions; my favorite one being VirtueDesktops by Tony Arnold. VirtueDesktops, or more shortly ‘Virtue’, was abandoned when Spaces came out, and I’m using Spaces ever since. I did miss several features that the virtual desktops of yore offered, but the new features made up for it.

You can imagine I was thrilled when Tony approached me to design the icon for his new Spaces-enhancing application, Hyperspaces. The name, purpose, and features of the application instantly appealed to me, and we set off to make a great icon for it.

Continue reading Faster than Light; making the Hyperspaces icon….

Perspective Shift.

First off, let me thank everyone for such a great reception of Icon Resource. The first 24 hours of its existence were fantastically exciting, and I’ve gotten an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. I will consider all your input carefully. Now, I wanted to tell a story that relates a lot to, amongst things, Icon Resource and its genesis, but most importantly, radically changed the way I look at life and the things I feel strongly about.

It has been waiting to be written since late January of this year. It was around that time, late into the evening, in my brand new little office, that my laptop made the familiar ‘bling!’ sound of new mail. I got off from my chair, opened Mail, and found an email from a representative of Apple. They were wondering if I would be interested in a position at Apple in Cupertino.

Continue reading Perspective Shift….

Flow goes live.

After the beta times, Flow, the application whose signature icon I designed, has gone live. This great FTP client has been essential to be since the first beta builds, and it’s a joy to see it being released now. Congratulations to Brian of Extendmac on this momentous day!

Flow’s icon has been received with a lot of praise, as it’s safe to say about 65% of all my assignment inquiries begin with ‘love your work, […] especially the Flow icon!’. You can grab Flow for $29 or download a free trial here.

IconResource Launches.

The day has come, and Icon Resource, the biggest project I’ve spearheaded since the start of my own company has gone live. You can now go to the Icon Resource website to watch a sample video, read more about the contents, or acquire your access to the polished Icon Resource member area.

Continue reading IconResource Launches….

Making a Picturesque Icon.

I was contacted by Acqualia - the creators of the Apple Design Award-winning application Picturesque - to design a new icon. Picturesque, an application I already use on my blog, is stunningly simple in its purpose and product; it beautifies images, but not in the typical Core Image-filter like fashion you see most of the time. The true power is the simplicity; there’s no ugly distorting filters to get in your way, but a few tools catered to your needs which provide instant satisfaction.

Read on for the inside process in this ‘Making the Icon’ post.

Continue reading Making a Picturesque Icon….

FuzzMeasure 3.0 released.

Supermegaultragroovy released the upgraded Fuzzmeasure today, a very powerful application for recording, live sound and acoustics professionals. The new icon was made by yours truly, and I will blog about the making of this icon soon - it was an interesting tour of concepts.

For now, check out the free trial and website.

Making the Icon: Photon

Today, Photon was released by Green Volcano Software. Photon is basically the missing link in your photography workflow and a lot more; it helps you preview, arrange, sort and organize images, even when they are still on your camera or memory card. It’s exceptionally fast in handling large images in equally large quantities. I helped the developer, Michael, with a bit of testing and made the application icon. Read on for the process of making Photon’s icon.

Continue reading Making the Icon: Photon…

Leopard Stationery templates services.

As a tangy addition to my services in the time Leopard is being released, I am offering all my current clients and clients, who book(ed) a case with me for OS X icons, between now and November 9th a complimentary HTML stationery template design for the new Mail.app. Some eye-candy (of course I’m an early adopter ;));

One of my favorite Leopard features by far; the new Mail.app.

Acorn’s out.

Acorn, the new image editing program from Flying Meat is out. I found that out just now, as I was rubbing my eyes having just gotten out of bed. This gives me the chance to give a very educated blog post before anyone, uh, more witty can.

In his very funny blog post about ‘redacted.app’, Gus Mueller gave a clever preview of Acorn without spoiling the surprise. Acorn is, as he said in his interview, exactly the opposite from Photoshop. Photoshop’s “stuff”, and Acorn is “anti-stuff”. I’ll spoil a bit here as to why I have such insight in an application that was just released; I was in the Acorn beta while Gus wanted me to do some small icon work. What really astonished me was (apart from the rapid phase of development, a sure sign of coffee love) the way Gus solved a problem in the general image editor’s UI;

Acorn, as you can see, features the conventions we all know in image editors; we have tools, we take them from a palette to draw on a canvas. The result, for most image editors, is a screen akin to an airport where everything is up in the air and floats about your canvas, often obscuring parts or confusing you what palette to go to next. Acorn takes a very clever approach to this (does Gus know any other ways of approaching a hideous problem?); it puts the layer, tool, and color palettes into one. As you can see, this even features the tool’s options neatly in the right place. I’d kill for a version of my favorite image-editing gorilla with such a smart approach to reducing workspace clutter.

But smart placement of the things you need isn’t where Acorn’s features end. Gus has done well in keeping Acorn a simple and intuitive image editor you can just jump into. GPU (or hardware) acceleration, something that Pixelmator, the next hot thing in image editing land, boasts with, is something Acorn modestly lists in its feature listing. It has an intuitive feature for creating gradients, it smooths your pencil strokes, features a very nice fullscreen mode and much more.

Testing Acorn has been a very joyful experience for me, as Gus is very receptive to input and Acorn itself is nothing less than a joy to use. I’m happily buying a license for my girlfriend when I’m getting my next payment. It’s a mere 39,95 - as introductory price. You can test it out yourself or buy it now from his website.