Well, it’s that time of the year again, I’ve packed my bags and me and my girlfriend are off to celebrate 3 days of guaranteed fun at Lowlands 2008. Lowlands is a musical festival, with a huge line-up of artists, cultural events, and great food and people. It’s the third year I’m attending.

This year’ll be quite different than the last, as I’ll be taking my iPhone 3G, and I’ve also taken some time apart to make a beautiful and well-optimized web application for all attendees with iPhones and iPod Touches; LL4iPhone. With permission of the festival organisers, I could use some of their decals and branding in the app to give it a consistent feel. It was quite an interesting personal assignment to flex my poorly trained Javascript and PHP muscles, but it worked out quite nicely in the end. You can check it out at LL08.com (you’ll be automatically taken to the web app if you’re on an iPhone); it’s entirely free to use.

I will also try to update with pictures and text from twitter and perhaps even this blog post by using iPhone applications, if my battery levels allow it. If you’re at Lowlands, give me a call or email so we can meet up!

Priidu Zilmer, of zilmer.com famehas a nice post and Photoshop sample file available for those of you that want to make crisp Webclip icons for your website. Webclip icons are the images iPhones and iPod touches use when adding a website to the home screen. Since I can’t use a web application for iPhone when the icon sucks, I urge those to whom it may concern to check it out.

Incidentally, this is my first blogpost made with the iPhone native application ‘WordPress’. I like it so far!

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.

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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.

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If you’re eager to hear a bit more about my work, my person, and the whole story with Apple, I recommend you listen to Pomcast’s latest English episode, where I and StuFF mc discuss Apple, graphical user interface design and a bunch of other things.

Uli Kusterer remarks how this week was full of visual UI goodness; from the blog post by Sean Patrick about designing and implementing resolution-independent Leopard-style buttons in Mac OS X, to the release of Icon Resource (featuring Alastair’s interesting thoughts on the videos in the package) and a podcast about making custom views.

I also found John Gruber’s ‘Firefox vs. Safari’ post interesting, being in my Latitude browser state of mind, as he prefers Safari over Firefox for its, yes, superior UI. I’ve complained about this before on the blog, and it seems I am not the only one.

Also, talking about interface design and resolution-independence, I hope you have not missed the video of Cabel Sasser’s C4[1] talk – he posted the slides and a Photoshop file used in the presentation on his blog this week. Be sure to view the video if you haven’t seen it yet!