Unless you’ve been living under in a multitude of nuclear holocaust-proofed rocks, you’ve heard all about Apple’s new tablet, the iPad.

As usual with a large Apple product launch, I’ve written up this post to round up the good, the bad, and the ugly of all the new interface and interaction designs that were set loose on the world by the company that’s regarded as the most influential and skilled when it comes to designing experiences. The usual disclaimer applies: iPad hasn’t hit the market yet, and thus its UI may still be subject to change or improvement.

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In August last year, I decided to hold a limited sale period for Icon Resource, since I was about to upgrade it with new content for existing members. I like giving people free upgrades whenever possible: Icon Resource was always meant to be an ongoing project, and it still is. However, it’s taking longer than expected to roll out the new websites. It’ll certainly be worth the wait, though!

Here’s a brief a look at the new Icon Resource – and its new brother, iPhone Resource. There’s something new for previous and new members in the works, but I’m not ready to release it yet. This only means that there’ll be that much more content for you if you’re a member: two entirely new courses on Mac / Windows icon design, including intermediate and advanced techniques.

iPhone Resource, a separate and new set of courses, focuses on making amazing iPhone icons and interfaces. It’s shorter and more concise than its big brother, but from what I’ve seen in the App Store, it’s certainly sorely needed.

You will also get a brand new member area, where you can watch course videos, review lessons and download files. An iPhone application is also in the works, but I can’t tell much about that yet. It’ll be released a bit later than the actual upgrade.

Much design love went into this new version, and all pages have been redesigned from the ground up. The new login page went through over a hundred iterations. Click on the image to view it at full size on Flickr.

I expect to roll out the entire new Icon Resource upgrade in late February or March. As an existing member, you will be notified by email (and only this time! I hate newsletter spam) when the new content arrives. The price will remain unchanged.

Warships, a game designed by me and developed by the Canadian Edovia is now available on the App Store. It’s a great, simple game of naval conflict, and I had a lot of fun designing it. You should get it (while it’s still a mere $1!) here.

However, I won’t be doing a lengthy post on its design process this time around. Instead, I made a video in which I tell you a bit about the process and show off some timelapses of the game graphics and icon. Consider this an experiment, and let me know what you think!

Viewing in HD at Vimeo is recommended!

Perhaps you’re aware that you can connect to a Mac back home with Back to my Mac, a service offered by MobileMe. When I heard of this feature, I did some reading and set everything up right, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I think Back to my Mac is a really cool idea, but it could use some work. It could even tie very well into Apple’s possible new tablet-sized device.

Enter MobileMe Home. After entering your MobileMe credentials on your Airport or Time Capsule, your network becomes accessible when you’re away from home. No enabling settings in some tab in a preference pane or forgetting to put a file on your iDisk: you can connect back home from anywhere with the Finder on your laptop, with an iPhone app, and from public or other computers through the MobileMe web interface.

MobileMe Home’s web interface allows you access to your Mac’s files, use a web-based client to do simple screen sharing, stream a few songs or videos from your iTunes library, and locate, wake, sleep or shut down your Macs from anywhere. On any Mac or iPhone, you can connect to your network to do all of the above, and more, like connecting to a non-Mac server or device on the road.

Even better, since your laptop (and possibly tablet) get on the move, you can track its location thanks to Snow Leopard’s Core Location features.

Check out a larger size of my rough MobileMe Home mockups at Flickr by clicking the preview below:

MobileMe Home is not an official Apple product, nor do I know anything of planned features of MobileMe. You should consider this an idea, or perhaps even a dream, seeing how technically MobileMe Home would probably be incredibly hard to implement. I just wanted to share it with the world.

It’s that time again: A new big cat is upon us, and while it hasn’t brought about the rumored ‘Marble’ aesthetic, there’s been a lot of enhancements, tweaks, and improvements to the user interface and graphics of Mac OS X 10.6, commonly known as Snow Leopard.

After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.

Since Snow Leopard has quite a few interface changes and tweaks, I’ve organized them into four sections. I’ll kick off with the most visible changes, and round the article up with (very) minor tweaks that are hardly noticeable, but show us that Apple still hasn’t lost its touch.

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RTS, or Real-time strategy games, have been with us since the birth of the first games that ever graced computer screens.

With some recent client work, I’ve been doing quite a bit of homework on strategy game interfaces; I dug out all my old games, played and screen-captured over two dozen game interfaces, mocked up a massive amount of approaches to problems, and talked with some friends in the gaming industry. As a UI designer, I’m fascinated to see how it’s developed in the last 20 years and in which direction it is now headed.

It’s quite interesting to look not just at where we’re heading, but also where we’ve come from. Since the invention of chess and other similar strategic board games, it’s clear that people love the tactile experience that manipulating ‘units’ gives. However, with today’s world of massive virtual representations of battlefields, this feeling has been diluted significantly. The relevant question for me is, obviously, how multi-touch devices like the iPhone can bring back the sweaty palms and rush that you experience forward the first pawn in a game of chess.

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