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.

Of course, I watched the Macworld SF keynote yesterday, and apart from noticing the iWork.com icon, I also saw all sorts of nice UI changes and icons. I skimmed through Apple’s new online guided tours and walkthroughs and I’ve compiled a (far from exhaustive) roundup of all the fancy new UI stuff in the iWork and iLife ’09.

I’ve divided this post into areas of interest, and not by application, as I have no access to iLife ’09 yet, and I think that the changes and additions to the interface design serve themselves much better to being divided into logical groups that go beyond just the product itself.

Continue reading…

Now here’s some speed icon drawing! :)

I did this simple icon drawing of Apple’s just-announced iWork.com service, which was previewed in the keynote on a slide. I based this icon off that.

Grab it here:

iWork dot com icon (Mac + PC) – 940 KB

Again, please do not use for anything other than personal computer customization. iWork.com’s logo and name are trademarks of Apple Inc.

A while back I also previewed a wallpaper made out of a personal experiment where I recreated Leopard’s awesome System Preferences icon at 2 by 2 meters. Since the detail is sufficient, people requested the wallpaper-sized version. It’s too busy as a wallpaper to my tastes, but with the older aluminium Macs, it’s fun to fullscreen it and create a really big System Preferences icon :)

Grab it here:

System Preferences Wallpaper – 900 KB

And yes, it also serves as a great first test of my inline blog download button!

I didn’t intend to write a single letter on my blog before the impending redesign of all my websites, but here I go anyway; today, Phill Ryu and Andrew Kaz opened the doors of the website of Classics, a great new iPhone application that will be out soon. I was honourably tasked with designing the interface, website, and a book together with the awesome David Lanham. Classics offers a gorgeous, tactile experience for reading some all-time literary classics (hence the name), with a sturdy collection of literature that will be expanded with updates in the future. Read on for some great images of how the interface (and icon) developed as time progressed, and some bonus images of my alternative Flatland cover designs.

It was the 12th of September of this year, when I was sitting at home designing a great user interface concept for a desktop app, and Phill contacted me. He told me all about this new project, and we soon found out we were definitely on the same frequency. It’s interesting to see how such an app starts out; at first, we had this clean slate to work off of, and after a mockup session for the ‘reading view’, the idea started to take wings.

I designed a set of interface mockups for Classics right before I went on my trip to San Francisco. David Lanham took my mockups and created a beautiful, toned down color theme and a set of adjustments that made the interface a gorgeous whole that is very pleasant to read in. Real-life testing was an important part of the application; users could be lying in the park grass reading a book on their iPhone in the bright afternoon sun, and if they are, they should be able to still read pleasantly without having to squint an eye or going indoor and looking at an interface that’s completely black on white. In the end, we got a beautiful interface together that just worked beautifully on the high resolution iPhone screen, and I think I speak for everyone involved when I say that I’m very proud of the way the interface turned out.

Then there’s also the part of the app most people contact me for, the icon. I only designed a suggested alternative icon for Classics (the middle icon in the image below), as David was creating a set of concepts. Here’s some of the icons we went through; we eventually settled with the bookshelf David designed (although a more polished version than the one shown here).

I really like the way the icon looks on my home screen, and I must admit that although I liked the simple concept of having just a book as the icon, the shelf works better as the bookshelf is really the ‘face’ of Classics. It’s also a joy to use; scrolling it up and down and rearranging all the books is a lot of fun, and it’s very snappy.

I also designed a set of covers for Edwin A. Abbott’s classic braintwister ‘Flatland’, one of my favorite mind-expanding books. Flatland is the life story of a square in a truly twodimensional world. He explains his world, and he eventually finds other worlds like ‘Lineland’, a one-dimensional world, and ‘Spaceland’, a three-dimensional world. It’s very powerful, as it can have you thinking about the possibility of a fourth spatial dimension or the implications of life in a world where there’s only two. Definitely a worthwhile addition to the Classics collection of books.

It was a lot of fun laying out the typography inside the book and designing these accompanying covers; While I got a lot of feedback about these covers, most people really liked the rightmost one, which is the one that made it onto the shelf. You can see it on the website now.

As you can see from the end result, Classics boasts an impressively subtle interface, that’s still very attractive, and is perfectly suited to reading text in any situation. The great aspect of reading in Classics is what Phill called the ‘tactile experience’; users can flip the pages with their fingers, making reading a book feel a lot more realistic and natural. It may sound gimmicky at first, but if you actually use the application, you’ll discover how pleasant it really is. I’ve been reading a lot for all of my life, and Classics is really the natural evolution of reading to me. Without having to lug around a bag of my favorite books, Classics offers me a gorgeous shelf of literature that I can read on the go, in line at the grocery store, or in the warmth of my home with the cat curled up on my lap. Even the most avid bookworms will find the iPhone a great platform to read books on now.

Classics will be available soon on the Apple App Store; you can take a look at the website me and David designed here to subscribe to the information newsletter and get notified when Classics is released! Also, don’t forget to digg it!