With ingame graphics like these, who needs designers?

CCP, creators of the only game I play (regularly) showed off a new graphics engine in this trailer I found today. A few screenshots taken by me and link inside.

Continue reading With ingame graphics like these, who needs designers?…

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!

New freeware iconset release: Orion.

( Go to icon set directly)

For the last month, I have been working on a freeware icon set to supersede all my older work. I was interested in how much I could learn by attracting critique from the most valued artists and criticasters I have in my buddy lists and address book, and I took it all to the heart. I decided to make a folder set that would find the middle ground between the flat front-on perspective of Mac OS X Leopard and the old, spatial perspective of folders in Tiger.

Continue reading New freeware iconset release: Orion….

FuzzMeasure 3.0 released.

Supermegaultragroovy released the upgraded Fuzzmeasure today, a very powerful application for recording, live sound and acoustics professionals. The new icon was made by yours truly, and I will blog about the making of this icon soon - it was an interesting tour of concepts.

For now, check out the free trial and website.

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.

For Spite.

Gedeon Maheux writes up how the ‘Marble of Doom’ website came to be.

Scary enough, I realized after reading this that ‘Marble of Doom’ slipped into my vocabulary after I had seen the website and my girlfriend laughed when I first used it out loud. Memes, anyone?

One SimCity per Child

It seems I haven’t been the only one raving about SimCity being great in every possible aspect; The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative has gotten a generous donation by EA; the original (aka ‘Classic’, aka ‘1.0′) SimCity, for use on all these cheap laptops in developing countries. In another cool move;

the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”

I think this is a very good move from EA; although the game is dated, it’s still a very useful and educational game. It was quite inspiring for me in my younger years as well.

Naked Light preview.

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.

Apple opens up on Darwin 9.0.

Not so long after the release of Leopard, Apple has decided to hit us with the release of the source code of the kernel. The Darwin 9.0 sources are available for download (free ADC membership required) here.

Now there’s a thing we little know and love about Apple; an open-source rendering engine and kernel (and of coures, even more open-source projects slightly less significant than those).

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.