Imagine how I felt when I was sitting at my desk, Nexus One in one hand and pen in the other, after being asked to design doubleTwist’s media player for Android. Android doesn’t have a very nice media player in terms of design (I’m carefully picking my words here – I don’t want to offend the undoubtedly hard working people at Google) and it was easy to just go the way some developers go: make an iPhone app, shoehorn it into Android, and call it a day.

We wanted something that actually advanced the state of the art. I sure as hell wasn’t going to use an entirely new platform for months just to ape another. It was a mixed blessing to have so little limitations on what constituted a ‘native’ user interface.

Android has its guidelines, but most apps (even the Google-sanctioned Twitter app) have a very ‘custom’ appearance. We opted for a look that works well on the various devices and custom ‘shells’ (notably, HTC’s terrible “Sense” interface) and arrived at this muted, native-looking yet polished visual scheme, which also helps users navigate the app in direct sunlight, where OLED screens like the Nexus One’s tend to be hard to read. Subtle usage of textured surfaces in the application also help prevent color banding on the color-limited OLED screens.

I’m happy to have this in the hands of Android users. It’s sometimes depressing to read comments on tech websites of people exclaiming: “Why would you even care about how a media player looks or works? You play music and turn off the screen!”, but I am sure there’s a lot of people who will appreciate the thought and details that went into this app. And that makes it all worth it.

The player is available on the Android Marketplace for free for a limited time.

As a disclaimer: I did not design any aspect of Billings Touch.

As you can see, it has a sharp icon that resembles its desktop counterpart. Upon opening the app, you are greeted by its gorgeous main screen.

I can’t divulge much about it yet, but the app does pretty much everything I ever dreamed of having in my pocket for my on-the-go demands. I’ve even come to use its timer as a punch clock next to my computer so I can even more effortlessly pause or resume my time tracking when I go off to brew a nice cappuccino.

In short: the app syncs with your Mac database of Billings (and vice-versa, new slips and invoices you created and tick off on your iPhone get synced back to your Mac over the air), and every single nook and cranny is wonderfully designed, as I’ve come to expect from Marketcircle.

It also works great without the desktop app: as a standalone app, it’s already a very powerful set of tools to add to your workflow. You can follow Marketcircle or me on twitter if you want to know when Billings Touch hits the App Store.

However, I won’t be doing a lengthy post on its design process this time around. Instead, I made a video in which I tell you a bit about the process and show off some timelapses of the game graphics and icon. Consider this an experiment, and let me know what you think!

Viewing in HD at Vimeo is recommended!

With ‘demos’ like Snow Stack, however, this will soon change. If you’re running Snow Leopard and Safari right now, you can check it out right here. Otherwise, just check out the video. Snow Stack is similar to CoolIris, which I like, but it’s made with pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I love it.

On that note, I’ll soon start using the <video> element for all video on my blog. To support Opera and Firefox, all media will be available in H264 and OGG formats. I’ll be very happy when I can say I’ve banished the scourge of Flash from all my websites.

Hat tip to Wolfgang Bartelme for sharing Snow Stack on Twitter.

With its .99 dollar sale price and upcoming 2.0 update, Groceries warrants a blog post. I’ve worked with Sophia to make a few icons for this great, polished iPhone app. I can’t go to the supermarket without it anymore.

If you’re not so sure about why you’d want to have a shopping list application on your iPhone, you can do what I did; go through your iPhone notes and discover a few dozen old shopping lists, and then reminisce about that last time you were in the store and wanted to add something to the list. Kind of annoying, isn’t it? Groceries has almost all possible items you can encounter while you’re out shopping in its database, and lets you add them to the list with but a few virtual keystrokes or taps.

Grab Groceries (link opens iTunes) for $ 0.99 during its sale.

And yeah, doing some testing of layout features of Cocoia Blog 3.1 here. If you see general weirdness ensue, please bear with me or report the weirdness to me via Twitter or email.