I did this cover design for Sun Tzu’s ‘the Art of War’ eBook in Classics. It was done quite a while back, when I was just starting to use my Cintiq, but just recently the 1.3 update for Classics hit iPhones and iPods with a the latest bunch of new books.

I’ve never really had the time to spend a week on a painting, so this, too, is one in a series of speed paints. But it was my first actual ‘commercial’ painted work on my tablet. These days, I’m spending a lot more work on design work for games for iPhone and other platforms, and I’ve actually been using my tablet a whole lot. Painting is very different from my usual approach to designing, which involves making vector shape layers for everything. I’m far from actually painting for a living, but I can recommend designers to try doing more ‘free’ artwork design as well every now and then.

Quite a fun departure from my usual work: I’ll be able to show off a lot of cool stuff in September! Also, this month I will resume my regular posting schedule, including releasing a few more wallpapers and icons.

With its .99 dollar sale price and upcoming 2.0 update, Groceries warrants a blog post. I’ve worked with Sophia to make a few icons for this great, polished iPhone app. I can’t go to the supermarket without it anymore.

If you’re not so sure about why you’d want to have a shopping list application on your iPhone, you can do what I did; go through your iPhone notes and discover a few dozen old shopping lists, and then reminisce about that last time you were in the store and wanted to add something to the list. Kind of annoying, isn’t it? Groceries has almost all possible items you can encounter while you’re out shopping in its database, and lets you add them to the list with but a few virtual keystrokes or taps.

Grab Groceries (link opens iTunes) for $ 0.99 during its sale.

And yeah, doing some testing of layout features of Cocoia Blog 3.1 here. If you see general weirdness ensue, please bear with me or report the weirdness to me via Twitter or email.

Currencies by iPhone app maker Edovia (known from Apple TV ads featuring Rocket Taxi) has been submitted to the App Store. It was a real joy working with Luc on this simple, straightforward, yet powerful currency converter.

I’m not sure about you, but before I had a build of Currencies on my iPhone, I used Google for my conversions between ten and twenty times each day (thanks to American clients and my love for Japanese collectibles). I am very happy to have something much more elegant now, and I’m eager to see this application hit the App Store to read user feedback.

It’s available right now, for $0.99 in the App Store: Click here to go open iTunes and go straight to the application page.

While working on Currencies, I also made some images of my new workspace. I get a lot of questions over email or twitter about the way I got my desk set up, and it’s been moved in such a way that I can now fully enjoy this year’s summer season without having to suffer ‘withdrawal symptoms’ from not being with my dear workstation. I got some really neat Japanese figures and mecha set up on it (some from Japanese clients), which I will blog about sooner or later.

Click here to go to Flickr and see more images of the figures and angles of the workspace. This setup with the Wacom Cintiq is really enjoyable; I can just put aside the bluetooth keyboard and (not-so-mighty) mouse and then just draw and doodle at my leisure. Splendid.

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.

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…

How very awesome it is to see this on Apple’s website (and possibly on TV!). You can read about the design process of Classics here.