Post-Lowlands post.

Wow, what a blast. The last four days could only be described as my second Lowlands that left me completely in awe. Large acts on this festival included Mika, Gabriel Rios, Basement Jaxx, Chris Clark, the Editors, the Kaiser Chiefs and Tool. And to Tool I went.

My head should be about at the horizon of human bodies at the left. My girlfriend, quite a bit less large as I am, is hidden by all the people. As it might convey, it was a nuthouse of people pushing, throwing beer, hitting me and more of such annoying things, but that utter and complete torture of the body was well worth massaging the soul with the purely amazing show and music.

But Lowlands isn’t entirely about the music (although I was swinging at acts like Orishas, Clark, Air Traffic and Ojos de Brujo), it’s about the atmosphere, food, and people. I really enjoyed it from setting up the tent to driving home at 5 AM. So much for my vacation, back to the daily icon life.

Noble has been selling great, and I found myself engrossed in email when I came back. I will, given my degree of exhaustion, keep it at this limited price today, but I will set a new base price tomorrow; €50,-. I think a price cut can be justified, and I won’t hear anyone complaining about that, I think. To all people who got the set; I will be sending your package out today.

I’ll make some new refreshing posts soon to show my progress in the days that I am picking up work again and I want to thank everyone for the kind input and messages I got while I was away.

A few notes…

I wanted to announce a few other things. First of all, I will celebrate a whopping three days of vacation at Lowlands 2007, a musical festival that is all about atmosphere. You there? Spot me and get a free drink (it’s the guy in the Cocoia t-shirt, duh).

More importantly for all blog readers; as I have announced yet another War on Bad Design icon set it makes all the more sense to do some price-slashing! In the days that I’m out (starting thursday, August 16th and ending monday, August 20th), Noble, my stock icon set, will be discounted to a mere 30 euro’s. Be snappy and get it while it’s hot (and practically free - had I mentioned to you you get addon packs for free and a lifetime of free use?). And who knows, if sales are going well, I might stick with the price.

Just a little note…

Tomorrow will see a wild announcement. No, really, something all of you will really, really, really like. Stay tuned, subscribers, leechers and readers alike.

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European Iced Coffee Smackdown.

After all the hard work of last week, I thought a light-hearted end of the month with a look at European iced coffee brands and how they compare to each other would be nice. Every travelling geek needs his cafeïne kick, and iced coffee is one of my favorite drinks to stay sharp and enjoy the taste of arabica.

I’ve picked three brands that are mostly available. As a weigh-in, I’ve taken Emmi’s “Choco Latte” swiss chocolate milk, because Emmi’s renowned for it’s cafeïne-containing drinks beyond just the coffee-flavoured ones. I will judge the four contestants by ‘coder’s value’ (Cafeïne, general effects on your mental state), ‘taster’s choice’ (overall flavour), graphic design, and ‘interface’ design (meaning the end-user friendliness of the package).

From left to right in the header image you can see;

So, how do the contestants weigh in terms of cafeïne? It’s easy to match the drinks, given the numbers are out there. When consulting the packaging of the drinks, we can find out that contestant 2 (Mövenpick’s Caffé Espresso Fredo) does do justice to it’s name. It contains about six percent total in coffee extract, placing just above contestant 4 (Swiss chocolate milk Emmi’s Choco Latte) when it comes to cafeïne percentages. Top ranked is contestant 3 (Emmi’s Caffé Latte Espresso) - it contains a whopping 13% of coffee extract. Closing the gate is Café Fresco, with a minute 1,1% of coffee extract.

Conclusion for the ‘coder’s value’: Picking an Emmi’s or Mövenpick might be the best idea if you are going for a more clear state of mind.

Moving on to general flavour. Although it’s hard to pass judgement on something so personal, I can say I like a round but tangy taste in iced coffee; it shouldn’t slap you in the face with bitterness but it should also remind you you’re drinking coffee instead of aromated chocolate milk.

The absolute winner of flavour is Emmi’s Caffé Latte Espresso. It’s very tangy, has a strong taste that doesn’t make your cheek muscles contract and it sits nicely on an empty stomach. Second is Café Fresco; although it’s meager cafeïne percentages wouldn’t indicate for it, it has a rich flavour that sticks around, while not being fast in it’s deterioration into a milky after taste. Mövenpick can easily be ranked last; it has a watery flavour and doesn’t bring a special aroma or detail worth remembering to the table. I will keep out the Emmi’s Choco Latte from this part of the review because it’s not worth weighing it up against all-coffee flavoured drinks.

Graphic and end-user interface design are also important. While being a matter of opinion, I can definitely say that Café Fresco takes the award. The posters advertising it around my city are fantastic to look at;

Strong, truly Dutch design sticking up it’s head in our streets. There is another poster with metro graphics; I suggest you take a search around the internet if you like them, there’s some pretty high-res imagery of it out there. A runner-up is Emmi’s, for having a tight, unified style, albeit somewhat heavily leaning on design cliché’s.

That’s graphic, however. The ‘interfacing’ with Café Fresco iced coffee (and all others, really) is a bit of a nuisance. First of all, there’s always two steps to opening your package; there is some sort of plastic cover on top that breaks too easily and is prone to cut open your second drink cover, and there’s the plastic cover that you pull off (a ‘freshness seal’, if you will). The second, I have no problems with, but it’s the first that’s really purely aesthetic. You can’t convince me that you should use it to re-seal your drink because it does a shitty job about that.

Mövenpick has an interesting feat, however; their drink is encased in something which seems to be shaped to a standard model of a human hand. Which means your fingers kind of fit ‘into’ the drinking cup, which is a bit freaky, cool, and useless at the same time. I’m not going to give out points for that, and based off my previous observation about the top covers of the drinks, they’re all getting an “F” for not being able to innovate.

Conclusion

For overall value for coding geeks, and pure taste and simple design I think Emmi’s is a clear winner. Café Fresco is a runner-up, while it has good design, it fails to deliver when it comes to the desires of people like me.

That was it for this month. Expect some words on the new Cocoia Main on here, perhaps, and of course, blogging into July this night. Stay tuned and thanks for reading :).

Cocoia.com on a genuine iPhone.

A good friend has helped me out with this; as a lucky owner of a great brain and an iPhone, he’s shot these images for me;

As you can see, that looks totally gorgeous. I’ve also seen some pictures of my mail and my personal work, but I won’t bore you with this further. I just thought this was pretty awesome.

Icon requests. What to do?

Hello readers. I’ve gotten quite a few people who have requests for a specific icon, whether it be a replacement or original icon, or a system icon, some people have some good ideas and want to see more icons pushed out.

I got vacation, and although I work a lot of client work and the second pack of the War on Bad Design icons is already underway, I want to see some requests. I might, if the amount of requests is sufficient, make a “Month of Icons” following the “Month of X” convention of making a new release each day. So, what do you want to see? Let me know in the comments or via email. As I said, sufficient requests means that you’ll get what you want.

Buzz.

WWDC buzz. It’s everywhere. What will we see at WWDC this year? Well, as I am one of those unfortunate souls that can’t go this year, I’ll just do the most pathetic thing I can do; speculate about what we’re going to see. It’s also a bit of wishful thinking.

When it comes to hardware, ideally, a good headless Mac that’s cheap. I think Apple might be revamping the Mini for some good graphics performance in Leopard, and perhaps put it in a different price class. The iMac, I hope, will also see improvement soon. It’s a close call between those two, as the iMac will certainly get a good upgrade now that the Macbook Pro’s got it’s specs bumped.

And Leopard - ohh, Leopard. Yes, I am quite sure it will be truly amazing what Apple has in store for us at at the keynote. Rumours about a new look for the GUI aside, we’ve got tens if not hundreds of things to wonder about. Apple’s got us where they want us, curious to the point of biting our fingers off. Some pessimistic souls claim that there won’t be anything surprising for us in store, and as always, after the keynote there will be a crowd that expected miracles or something with religious significance and express their disappointment. However, I’ve got good faith and knowledge that this year will be amazing to all Mac users. From WWDC, it’s one straight run to the finish; Leopard on all Macs. And that’s what’s really getting me excited.

What do you expect to see this year? Or perhaps more truly, what do you want to see?

Now on Twitter…

Well, I made the jump with the rest of all trendy Mac users to get Twitter + Twitteriffic, after I found out I got some hits through it’s homepage. Why can’t you search tweets? It makes me sad not to be able to find something ‘relevant’ and I haven’t got one friend!

You can add me, my username is Cocoia. Anyone who tweeted something linking to my site, or feels like he’s got something to tell, please let me know and I’ll start watching ;).

Stop bothering me.

I don’t know what moron calls himself ‘Fag stomper’ at all, but I already know you’re from Michigan, in the city of Lansing, Comcast for a provider and they got a complaint about someone spamming just now. Stop posting offensive comments, it’s useless as I have to moderate them anyway. I consider the matter closed. Here, take a look at this purdy map of your location:

For everyone but me and this strange individual; some strange person has been trying to post rather offensive and blatantly misspelled comments on my blog. I won’t repeat his words, because they will simply be ignored, and deleted. Get a life, dude.

Message to all RSS-using blog readers.

The stripped version of the feed has been replaced with one containing images and line breaks. Don’t go off duplicating the site, please. Delete the feed in your reader to re-sync. Some RSS apps may pick up on the change, but Vienna doesn’t. Hope this fixes your problem, Jo.