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.

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…

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, 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.

I’ll be out starting tomorrow and you can get Noble with 70% discount starting now. Grab it at the Icon Store if you need some icons. Do note that I won’t be able to email out the icon sets and licenses until I am back, but I’ll send them as soon as I get home.

Now for something to keep you sweet all the days that I am away; a little new preview of the folderset. Unorthodox nature motives! Check out the preliminary unpolished Aqua, Anodized and Wood variants;

Input very welcome! Now, I’ll see you all again August 20th – I’ll be sure to enjoy myself with the music, atmosphere and people.

‘Tis late, but it’s been quite a day.

Noble has gone on sale, finally, and this gorgeous 128-to -16 pixel sized icon set has quite a lot in (icon) store. As you can read on the website, various icons have been included for specific Leopard features, modern devices and in the tradition of Cocoia, requests will be honoured like the ones that will be announced with this conclusion of the contest that will give away four licenses of this great cornucopia of icons. The Noble Add-on set that will follow out of this will be free for the contest winners and all other license holders!

Contest Winner 1: Kyle Nilson

Nobody came close to Kyle’s excellent suggestion in terms of both originality and feasability;

(…)
One of the most under-catered fields in GUI is biology and the hard sciences in general. A great deal of developers homebrew apps to calculate annealing temperatures, enzyme digests, chemical compounds, and other technical mixes. In addition, one must often use small simple apps to program various tools to work properly, such as mixer tables, PCR machines, centrifuges, microscopy packages, and ultraviolet photoboxes.

Various icons are needed for DNA, RNA, timers, enzymes, temperatures (both metric and imperial), forces, compounds, master mixes, and many other thoughts, ideas, and processes in the scientific world. (…)

It sure did, Kyle!

Contest Winners 2, 3, and 4; ;

Nicholas Brawn suggested a console / terminal icon, a (network) activity icon, and something that represents logs or log viewing. An excellent suggestion.

Leif Singer had a fantastic list of suggestions like Operation.Success, Operation.warning, User.login / User.logout, Clipboard.copy and Clipboard.paste, Document.print, Sort.descending and ascending and Document.SaveAs. Fantastic all around.

Last but not least, Zac Cohan offered suggestions for website functions like Home, Support, Downloads, Help documentation, user login, and various navigational elements. Thanks for the tip, Zac!

I hope the winners enjoy their licenses a lot and starting now, you’ll be able to support my endeavour for freeware icons and ad-less websites by buying yourself a set – it’s a lifetime of use and great karma. Good night, everyone!