Icon Resource 2 is actually here.

It’s great, because today is also my birthday. The best present I could give myself is bringing Icon Resource 2 to all existing members and welcome new members to the website.

As interest for techniques in iOS icon design has grown considerably, Icon Resource now has a small sibling in iOS Resource, which (for now) teaches you iOS icon design techniques, but will soon rise up next to its brother with full fledged tracks on scalable UI design and other techniques that are essential in designing for iOS.

If you are an existing members, you will get several new advanced level courses in icon design for free. You should get an email soon with new login information that gives you access to the member area. If you have not received an email by tomorrow, do drop me a line (twitter also works). I hope you enjoy all the new content, and I will update this new platform more this year with free new content.

Now that the smoke on the mobile computing battlefield has cleared, though, one can pick through the remnants and find a good deal on what is interesting technology. It’s easy to be discouraged by all the lemons and genuinely weird micro-PCs, but I’ve also found a little gem in there. And that bulky, funny looking gem is the Vaio UX.

The Vaio UX is the type of PC you would imagine you find in small, bustling gadget shops in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. At a glance, it doesn’t even resemble a PC — most UMPCs at least attempt to retain a laptop-like form factor or assume a ‘slate’ like shape — but it has all, if not more of its features. When it was first introduced, at the cost of over fifteen hundred dollars, it did raise a few eyebrows. Unfortunately for Sony, it didn’t create a new market.

Inside the one-pound UX is a 250+ DPI (‘Retina Display’, anyone?), 4.5″ touchscreen packing a resolution of 1024×600, as well as internals that are very similar to the first generation Macbook Air: a Intel Core Duo ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) processor with a single gigabyte of RAM and Intel GMA 950 graphics. More on that hardware semblance later on in this post. It also came with either EDGE wireless or a CompactFlash slot, a Memory Stick Duo slot, 802.11b/g wireless, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a Fingerprint reader, one front and one back facing (!) camera and a tiny little SSD or HDD.

As a real PC, it even had one USB port and audio in/out ports on its sides, but once set down into its cradle, it has a total of four USB ports, a FireWire port, a VGA port (yes, powering another display) as well as Ethernet. Quite a lot for such a tiny device.

Of course, it had the typical pitfalls of PCs: the UX struggled to get over three hours of battery life on its stock battery. The $120 extended battery brought it up to eight hours, but such a premium was a lot to ask when you were paying almost two thousand bucks for a PC already. Its huge price, short battery life and thickness and bulk didn’t appeal to the mass market, and we all know that the iPad and netbooks took its intended niche by storm.

Despite all that, I picked up a European model with the catchy name VGN-UX1XN on eBay for a fraction of its original retail price and upgraded it with an extremely tiny 1.8″ 64 GB SSD. Why did I get it, you may ask?

Drawing:

The Vaio UX has a resistive touchscreen. You know, those old takes-effort-to-push-things screens without all the multi-touchy goodness we have grown accustomed to. What they do have going for them, though, is being sensitive to regular old stylus pens. And the Vaio UX comes with just that: in a little compartment on the back you find a little pen you can use to tap things on the screen and draw. I use Autodesk’s excellent SketchBook for Windows 7 to draw on it, and it’s quite good. Thanks to the external screen rotation key, I can even hold it like a little portrait drawing pad. A really bulky, slightly warm drawing pad.

Good Old Game Console:

My favorite games are still the 1990-2000 era strategy games and role playing games. In particular, the Infinity Engine games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment are titles I enjoy playing every year. They still offer new experiences to me and are immersive and emotional stories I can lose myself in. Thanks to community fix packs, mods and patches, I can play them at the UX’s native resolution, and the UX seems to be almost made for these games: they control great with the ‘thumbstick’ and mouse buttons, and with text-size patches reading the lengthy dialogues between characters is pleasant. I’ve put at least sixty hours into Baldur’s Gate 2 on the Vaio UX, and I’m all the way up to the final act of Shadows of Amn.

I made a video about gaming on it:

Thanks to Good Old Games, I will never have a shortage of excellent games to play on it: point-and-click adventure games like Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey are already in my queue.

The Smallest (real!) Mac:

Ah, yes, about that Macbook Air hardware resemblance. Since the chipsets are so similar in the UX and Macbook Air, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to install Mac OS X on it ( — I haven’t tried Lion, yet) and of course I had to do that. My 64GB SSD is split in half and at startup I can easily pick an OS to boot. OS X works quite well thanks to third-party touchscreen drivers. I installed an Atheros AirPort card in the UX so I even have full BlueTooth and Wi-Fi support. It’s not the best experience (the memory card slot doesn’t work, as does the fingerprint reader), but it is quite usable and fun to have a small Mac in your backpack. A Mac you can draw on.

UI Prototyping:

I have been working on an interesting UI / UX proof of concept in the last few months that uses some of the ‘advanced’ hardware in the Vaio UX, and it’s been absolutely perfect for it. I can test Quartz Compositions under OS X, full interactive Flash and HTML5 / CSS3 mockups in full-screened Chrome on Windows, and even use hardware like the camera and fingerprint reader in them. I hope to show more of my work on it soon — probably at a conference or similar presentation.

The UX is one of the few UMPCs to have gathered a true cult following. A group of people dedicated to modding it have gone as far as to solder in new, faster dual-core CPUs, integrated full 3G HSPA wireless and more crazy upgrades.

If you have any questions regarding this fascinating little piece of PC history, let me know. It’s been a fun hobby to spend some hours on for me.

Gaming on the Mac is certainly not as common or well-supported as it is on Windows, but the HD5770 handles whatever you throw at it quite well. I still have to adjust to it, though: the HD5770 is not a brand-new top-tier graphics card, like the card I use in my Mac Pro for gaming under Windows (the HD5970), and can sometimes have issues with the latest games at 30″ monitor resolution (2560×1600 pixels -are- a lot to push around).

As for the PC enthusiasts that often sneer at the Mac GPUs ( – “What, doesn’t STEVE want you using *illegal* cards in your Mac? Sniff! Why buy the expensive Apple card?!” ), I have to explain that Mac OS X compatible GPUs require EFI / EBC firmware on their ROM chips to be initialized for use under OS X. This is not something you can just ‘hack together’: the cards’ ROM chip needs the extra space to have a (Windows) BIOS-compatible and (Mac) EFI-compatible firmware on there, and even then Apple has to make drivers that lets you use the card to perform well. Apple would, of course, love it if everyone could just drop a good GPU in there, as it’d just make the Mac Pro more attractive to consumers. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. On the bright side: you can do that just fine with hard drives, eSATA controllers, USB cards, firewire cards, most audio cards, and so on.

Despite that, it performs great. Fortunately for Mac owners that enjoy gaming, most titles that run on Macs can be shown in full detail on 30″ / 27″ displays using the HD5770. And best of all: it remains almost perfectly silent. You won’t be hearing it rev up the fans like the old 8800GT, completely nullifying Apple’s care to acoustics in the rest of the computer (my Mac Pro nary makes a sound).

It’s easy to connect; the card has my requisite dual-link DVI (for all ‘typical’ LCDs and the 30″ Cinema Display I use) and two mini Displayport outputs, for the LED Cinema Display and other DP monitors. It uses a single 6-pin cable from the Mac Pro motherboard to supply extra power, which is the same as my old Nvidia 8800GT, although the HD5770 is far more efficient: it draws far less power when idle, for instance.

The only two issues I have with the card are the price, as it’s about 75 dollars above the ‘street price’ of a PC HD5770, which is unacceptable for a larger ROM chip and some firmware and the requisite Mac Pro motherboard cable. I understand ATI may have to produce these cards in smaller runs, but it’s a big chunk of cash on top of what is normally 135 dollar card. The packaging sort of makes up for it:

(yes, that’s a little Sony Vaio UX UMPC. With OS X on it. Blog post coming? Hell yes!)

The other issue is grapical glitches in Minecraft. Somehow, despite having excellent performance, Java OpenGL graphics are a terrible mess. I suppose this isn’t as much an issue with the card as it is a matter of the Java runtime, but the artifacts are awful.

Overall verdict:

8/10. If you’re in the market for a graphics upgrade, I’d check out how well the now-finally-shipping HD5870 compares in terms of pure bang for your buck. If you’re using all the extra power pins on your Mac Pro motherboard already (check!), and need an affordable replacement for Nvidia’s horrible, unreliable cards and crash-prone drivers (especially in Photoshop – check!), this is a no-brainer. And you can use the box for… well, I don’t know. Storing cats.

- I’ve been working hard for the Mothership for the last months (hence the blog silence) and really enjoying the big workload. I’m very thankful to work with a lot of extremely talented people.

To get misunderstandings out of the way: I have not closed up shop, I have not relocated, and I am not working on Mac OS X Lion. Phew! This is also the reason I am not doing UI roundups and the likes for iLife ’11 or doing elaborate commentaries on Apple products. I’ll announce what I’ve worked on when it’s released, though!

- There will be new designs for Icon Designer, Cocoia and this blog next year!

- Icon Resource 2 is still very much being developed! Due to Retina Display and other new developments I’ve added some more material to the curriculum which piled on the delay. I’m wrapping things up for this year, so you can spend 2011 making awesome icons and interfaces. I apologize for the delay, but it’ll be worth it.

- I’ve been doing a video series on Minecraft. Check it out: the newest part, due out this week, will be very intense. A teaser:

Check out the full series here.

- Remember Composition? Vaguely perhaps? There’ll be news on that. It’s out of my hands, since I’ve been unable to complete it, but… well, I’ll save the good news for when it’s applicable.

- Speaking of old posts: I’ll be hitting up Dreamhack Winter 2010 again, thanks to sponsors like Intel, HP and others who are facilitating Pack4Dreamhack (with full press access!). Are you there? Let’s meet! I’ll be doing another ‘packing’ post and a report from the floor.

- And, of course, there’s some neat blog posts coming up. Good Old Games on extremely small touchscreen devices? Check! Pointers on Android UI design? Check! And (hopefully) showing off some work I have been doing for a PC / PS3 / Xbox 360 game.

(pardon the random image from the movie)

You can watch the whole thing here. If you do have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks to Linebreak for having me.