06 Nov
   Filed Under: Interface Design, News, iPhone   

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

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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.

06 Nov
   Filed Under: Design, Graphics, News   

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a game that looks very promising. Appleinsider has a few screenshots of the Mac alpha up (is it a Mac alpha? Might just as well be a bunch of PC screenies, apart from this one), and of course I noticed one thing more than all the others;

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Ouch. Mr. Carmack, let’s make a deal, okay?

06 Nov
   Filed Under: News, Typography   

The Serif reports that a shortened version of Helvetica, the eponymous documentary about the typeface, will be shown tonight. It will show on BBC 1 at 10.35 PM Greenwhich Mean Time. I haven’t seen it yet, but going from what I have heard, it’s very much worth watching.

05 Nov
   Filed Under: Apple, News, iPhone   

Quicktime and iTunes were just updated over at Apple.com. The upgrade’s new features aren’t revealed, but I am sure it will address some changes necessary for the iPhone 1.1.2 firmware.

T3 got their hands on an iPhone carrying the 1.1.2 firmware and posted a picture gallery; if the images are in any way reliable, there’s not a lot of changes apart from International language support. A bit of a bummer, if you ask me, if the update would echo in just a few extra keyboards and plug up some exploits.

04 Nov
   Filed Under: News, iPhone   

Via T3:


First off, there’s support for dozens of languages, so if you happen to be a fluent Cantonese speaker, the phone has all the relevant character sets so you can display your language properly.

There’s full support for French and German, with special keyboard lay-outs on the ready to tackle accented characters - perfectly understandable, of course, what with the phone heading for launch across the channel this month too.

This is very good news for people like me, who crave the iPod Touch’s “languages” button to switch autocompletion dictionaries to Dutch, German, or whatever you may need. I hope we’ll see a hack for this firmware soon.

02 Nov

Today, Photon was released by Green Volcano Software. Photon is basically the missing link in your photography workflow and a lot more; it helps you preview, arrange, sort and organize images, even when they are still on your camera or memory card. It’s exceptionally fast in handling large images in equally large quantities. I helped the developer, Michael, with a bit of testing and made the application icon. Read on for the process of making Photon’s icon.

Continue reading…

29 Oct
   Filed Under: Design, News   

Since the release of Leopard, a huge movement has already sprung up to change its look. Check out this colorful glass surface (ugh, is that a truck crashing?).

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Apparently, people are flocking to the new Dock as a means to customize OS X even more. I see a market for an app that does this, guys.

28 Oct
   Filed Under: Apple, Cocoa, Design, Icon Design, News   

I must once again graciously bow and thank Apple for taking mundane work out of my hands. Via Matt Legend;

We’ve all stolen Apple’s icons for things; now we’re officially allowed to. There are lots of new standard images available via NSImage -imageNamed:, including the Safari bookmarks image, all kinds of arrows, the gear icon, the Computer icon, Bluetooth and Bonjour logos, user account icons, the Info icon, and many more. The size of your app could drop significantly, as could your icon-design expenditure.

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As could my monthly income! But no, I’ve got more than enough interesting work on my hands. Matt has a fantastic (and that’s a horrible understatement) write-up of some highlights in the Leopard feature lineup of developer tools and API’s. Read his long and bookmark-worthy post here.

25 Oct
   Filed Under: News   

Excellent article by Adrian Shaughnessy about designers; empathizers and egotists.

25 Oct
   Filed Under: News   

Mike Lee has posted a very insightful blog post at motherfucker (that’s the name of his blog), called The Power of Charity. It’s about, well, charity, and presents some very cool ways that Delicious Monster uses charity to ‘teach’ users to give. It also shows some alternative ideas to make charity more accessible. Very worthwhile read.