It’s been a bit silent around here lately, but this is just incredible. I’m going to get me one of these. Via Infosthetics.
In browsing my RSS feed, I found that Susumu Yoshida’s blog had a link that pointed to several ‘drawer’-like icons containing the stack icons behind them in a Leopard dock. With a bit of guessing (I can’t read Japanese ;)) I found the original website, Optica Optima. Here’s the ‘Leopard Stack Drawers’ in action;
There’s but a few things that I really rush to download and use for usefulness, aesthetics and innovation; this one’s one of them. I wish I could write some Japanese so I could comment ‘Domo Arigato!’ to Susumu Yoshida, whose blog made me aware of this pretty cool idea, and the creator of the icons of course!
Get the Stack drawers here.
Fellow designer Fernando Lins pointed out this link to a website that grabbed my attention.
Naked Light, as previewed, promises to be a fully resolution-independent image editor with all the powerful features a designer might need. I won’t be making my judgement until I have actually used the application (the public beta will be due in a day and 10 hours, at the moment of writing) but it seems promising, going from the website;
Naked light throws away antiquated concepts like pixels; layers; 8-bit color; and destructive, non-re-editable filters and operations. Instead, compositions in Naked light represent a sort of Platonic ideal—with infinite resolution, an astounding 590 quintillion colors, and perpetually re-editable nodes.
Hopefully, this will help alleviate the high hopes users had for a Photoshop replacement in Pixelmator, which apparently failed to deliver.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a game that looks very promising. Appleinsider has a few screenshots of the Mac alpha up (is it a Mac alpha? Might just as well be a bunch of PC screenies, apart from this one), and of course I noticed one thing more than all the others;
Ouch. Mr. Carmack, let’s make a deal, okay?
I was going on a trip today and I was loading some videos on my iPhone of DEFCON 15. DEFCON is a conference in Las Vegas for security professionals with many ludicrously technical yet casual talks. I found that the Defcon Archive website didn’t offer the videos of this year’s conference up for download, but an excellent blog did; Roysac’s blog also had a small side note of a video dating back a few years, but certainly worth sharing.
This video (over an hour) goes into detail about text art. You have probably seen ANSI or ASCII artworks before in your life, but this is the most complete video I have ever seen about its development and background. Going back a thousand years before the dawn of computing, the speaker demonstrates how humans have been making text art over the ages and how it reached a spectacular peak in the age of BBS’es, before the dawn of the World Wide Web. “Underground” art groups were competing on bulletin boards for pure honour, making textual artwork (sometimes even animations) with painstakingly mundane ‘manual labor’. If you decide to see just one bit, check the last third of the movie for some pretty insane ‘textmode’ 3d animations.
The Roysac blog features a lot of information about the BBS scene, and specifically the art culture around it. Worthwhile addition to the artistically inclined geek’s RSS feeds.
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In my free time, I have been experimenting with the iPhone home screen icons. I was initially pleased by the icons, but found several to be lacking after having looked at them for prolongued periods of time. Since I don’t want to be greedy, I will share some techniques, know-how and tips with you to help you get up to speed designing icons for your own iPhone. I will also look at my upcoming set of icons and discuss why I am changing so little to the look of the default icons.