Aperture 2.0; custom everything.

Following up on my previous post showing a few design novelties in OS X 10.5.2, here are some quick observations on novelties in Aperture 2.0, which Apple released just today, on flickr. The Apple Pro Apps design team has gone far on customizing the look and feel - you’ll barely recognize the Aqua interface!

MDR 04 discusses interface design.

Although already out for a solid four days, I just got around to listening to the lastest episode of the Mac Developer Roundtable, in which Scotty, Andy Matuschak, Dave Symonds, Dave Nanian, Rich Siegel and Marcus Zarra discuss interfaces and interface design. Some interesting related experiences and opinions are also thrown over the table.

A listening recommendation for any developer. Grab it here, or subscribe to iTunes while you’re at it.

Apple updates Human Interface Guidelines.

It’s nice to see Apple finally updating the canon of Mac inteface design - the HIG, or Human Interface Guidelines - that you can read or download in PDF form here. I particularly liked the revamped section on icons, including a ‘Creating Icons‘ (albeit very basic, gives a good idea of the process of adding realism to icons) and the ‘Designing Toolbar Icons‘ section. A good read either way, as it’s very low on jargon and very high on interesting gotchas.

Leopard: Customization heaven.

From the same source as the stack drawers, I found that a new little application had been released that turns Leopard into the premiere point release of OS X when it comes to desktop customization. Susumu Yoshida, a talented icon designer, released his very elaborate set of brightly colored and nicely textured stack drawers, which I tested during the last week and thoroughly enjoyed. See this desktop screenshot;

Click for original and fullsize at Flickr.

I found that a software company, CocoaMug, has put together a tool to customize every aspect of your dock. It’s called Palette, and costs a mere $6.90 for a full license. It doesn’t just allow you to choose a color for the background of your 3D dock, but it also allows you to set these beautiful ‘drawer’ icons for individual stacks - making using stack drawers as simple as drag and drop. Click here for an impressive video demo on Susumu’s blog. Thanks for sharing, Susumu!

Physical computer dashboard gauge.

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.

iTunes 7.5 iPod sidebar battery indicators.

Very nice new feature of iTunes 7.5, which perhaps the new 1.1.2 iPhone update will also address;

I have always been a huge fan of Apple’s battery indicator art (no, this is not a joke, I find them genuinely impressive icons) and these ’sidebar-styled’ icons don’t deviate from the norm. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed to see this in the next update of the iPhone / iPod Touch. Via iLounge’s full writeup on new iTunes 7.5 features.

My personal Comm Station.

I have been working on a few technical things over the course of the weekend; first meshing my home wireless network by letting two routers form a single network, and after I was done, setting up MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for my Airport Extreme, which is the border gateway.

MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.

I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);

If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.

Futurist Interfaces.

This is a demonstration of Skyrails, a new visualisation system for datasets. It struck me that this is awfully similar to the scene from Hackers where they flew through that ‘city’ of ‘databases’ with all sorts of fancy eyecandy going on, but this is actually useful in plotting data and navigating it (or so it seems, judging from the short demo). Edit; Jelmar of Typehigh pointed out it’s eerily similar to EVE Online’s ingame star chart and overall camera work. Perhaps it was an inspiration.

If you’re pleased by what you see, you might be interested in checking out some of those fancy fantasy interfaces for the silver screen over at Mark Coleran’s portfolio.

John Siracusa burns some paper folders.

Poorly designed folder icons aren’t the end of the world, but it’s the context that’s so maddening. Here’s an interface element that maybe could have used some freshening up, but it was far from broken. Apple’s gone and made it worse in a way that’s obvious in seconds to anyone who’s ever given any thought to interface design. It boggles the mind. The rumor is that Jobs likes them. Great.

Some people on flickr apparently thought the same and quoted a recent article from me. I still think Apple is well aware of this; they went as far as to make alternative icons when you drag these ‘mundane’ folders into the 16-pixel only Finder sidebar;

I don’t think it was such a thing that ‘Steve liked them’; I think Apple’s engineers liked them in Coverflow, and much less so any other generic folder or icon. When you look around the entire interface, it’s obvious the focus is on Coverflow and large icon view; heck, Coverflow actually comes with a list view to help you drop the standard list view. What do you think?

Read the rest of Siracusa’s in-depth review of Leopard here

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iPhone Dev Center opens.

Apple opened the doors of its new ‘iPhone Dev Center‘ website, mainly an ADC on iTunes page where you can download several high-quality video sessions for developing rich web applications tailored to the iPhone.

You can whine about native applications all you want, but this is very interesting to people even looking to just make a second stylesheet for MobileSafari viewing (like me) and get some good pointers on the difference of desktop and iPhone / iPod interaction.

Edit; Jimmy from Gosquared has now registered the (iphonedevcenter.com) domain name.