Faster than Light; making the Hyperspaces icon.

I’m a big fan of virtual desktops. Essentially, they expand your working field by providing more ’screens’ to distribute your windows over. In Tiger, when Leopard’s Spaces application wasn’t in the picture, there were several solutions; my favorite one being VirtueDesktops by Tony Arnold. VirtueDesktops, or more shortly ‘Virtue’, was abandoned when Spaces came out, and I’m using Spaces ever since. I did miss several features that the virtual desktops of yore offered, but the new features made up for it.

You can imagine I was thrilled when Tony approached me to design the icon for his new Spaces-enhancing application, Hyperspaces. The name, purpose, and features of the application instantly appealed to me, and we set off to make a great icon for it.

Continue reading Faster than Light; making the Hyperspaces icon….

Flow goes live.

After the beta times, Flow, the application whose signature icon I designed, has gone live. This great FTP client has been essential to be since the first beta builds, and it’s a joy to see it being released now. Congratulations to Brian of Extendmac on this momentous day!

Flow’s icon has been received with a lot of praise, as it’s safe to say about 65% of all my assignment inquiries begin with ‘love your work, […] especially the Flow icon!’. You can grab Flow for $29 or download a free trial here.

Skype for Mac 2.7 beta drops the gloss.

In icon-related news, the latest Skype beta, with address book integration and other goodies, has ditched gloss in its (also 512 pixel) icon. A welcome change, in my opinion, although they could have actually made resources for 128 pixels; the downscaled version looks a bit weird.

Get the new beta here.

Candybar 3.0 released with Dock support and much more.

The revamped icon manager, now the old Pixadex and Candybar-in-one! I helped Cabel and the Panic dudes test this a bit, and it’s truly beyond what I could have imagined in an icon application. It’s simply a must.

Expect a new mystery freeware set in December with a custom dock to make full use of this gorgeous app! You can download the trial and explore its features over at Panic.

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!

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.

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.

Making the Icon: Photon

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 Making the Icon: Photon…