Growing icons, the Timezones price, and more.

Icon Designer is growing. Actually, it’s surpassing Cocoia with only four days out. It’s daily traffic is astounding. I should make a badge on the next update saying ‘pushing gigabytes of icons’. It’s tantalising to realise that this page might rake in more visits than the blog one day (and trust me, that’s a lot of traffic)It seems everything is exponential lately; the Vienna icon surpassed the Wireshark icon almost instantaneously, and is now catching up to the wildly popular Preview replacement.

A few people have been hurrying to get Timezones before I change the page - not to worry, I have extended it a few days to let the sales cool down a bit and then I’ll start charging the new amount of money for the download. Timezones 1.5 is coming fast, and it’s going to be set at this standard price because of the new functionality. I think all users will be glad to see a free update and the opportunity to buy new themes with each their own functions.

News has really been on a roll lately. With the iPhone ads airing (hey, I might not put it into the blog that much, but man, I’d love to get one of those, I’m a human / geek too you know) and the WWDC a week away, we’re in for a very exciting time. I’ve seen discussion heat up around the topic of a new look for the GUI in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Speculation? Sure, but it’s not like the iPhone has all the normal aqua widgets. We’ve seen a very interesting slider that has a new ’style’ of metal. Loss of plastic gloss, anyone?

Wow, Apple’s really got sophisticated with this new style they’ve got going on. I mean, we’ve all seen the filter bars of Mail and Transmission fame take over the iPhone UI, but this little detail is surprising. This could hint to new UI features we might see in the next week. Only Steve knows.

On a side note, I did want to bring it all a bit closer to the average Mac user, so here’s a little screenshot of what’s been lying around my disk for a while but didn’t seem to get finished.

It’s a makeover kit for VLC. Not just any makeover kit, a complete interface makeover kit with iPhone widgets. Nice, isn’t it? Perhaps I’ll finish it some day.

iPod innovation.

I came, in my stumbling around for iPod innovation, across this neat snippet of code. It’s by Keith Wiley, who also has a method on his site for trapping fourdimensional objects and counting to 1023 on two hands, and 31 on one. I think he’s awesome already, big credit to him. Now, on to the code.


You will have to pick around some of the Mac-graphics-specific details, but the general math is the same. Note that my code produces final rgb values in the range [0-65535], not [0-1] or [0-255]. Adjust to your requirements. Sorry for the lack of commenting.



What does this do? Well, it essentially reverses everything iTunes does when it stores images on your iPod in the opaque ithmb format. This snippet of code ‘decodes’ the interlaced images of 720*480 (apparently, a TV format for the AV output), and there are a multitude of other sizes present in the files. What does this mean to me? Uh, I got to up the resolution of Timezones to let you be able to check it out in high resolution on a TV. You want that, right?

Now, actually, what I am going to do is reverse the coding of the tiniest thumbnail graphics - the one the iPod displays when you enter your Photo Library. You’ll see why, but it’s obvious that it’s usable for many cool things. I might open-source it.

Since the people at Macthemes already had the love, I have to share it with all my subscribers too. Man, I hope you buy in the next week, because you’ll get a beta invite for this;

Yeah, we’ve come a long way.

Timezones 1.5 preview.

Here is a little preview of the 3d functionality (read: eye candy) of Timezones 1.5, in production and slated for June. All buyers reading this know that they are eligible for the beta and will all get the basic upgrade for free. Of course, there will be extra content for the willing. Extra themes, alternate layouts…

So stay tuned, more sneak peeks soon.

Edit: Now with actual live demo.

You really, really want to use this yourself to appreciate it as much. It’s totally awesome.

Minor tweaks, looking forward…

Okay Timezones users, regular blog readers and others; I think we’re gearing up for a great 1.1 release of Timezones in a few weeks, with hopefully the Praetorian beta-ready by the time I specified in April. There were some nice words on the icon on MacThemes and Aidemac (and some hits from other customization forums - thanks for holding up the copyright policy, guys, appreciate it) so I think it can do with a few tweaks to finalize it’s appearance. It seems (hard to notice on low-contrast displays) that the shadows are slightly cut, and the perspective of the images might do better with a different distortion angle. So you can look forward to that with the other tweaks and new themes that Timezones will see.

Timezones 1.1, by the way, will feature the disk image art you’ve all missed (I was doing it erroneously so you guys missed some nice, nice graphics. Ah well, coming up later), some more solid icons, extra timezones (because, unlike many people think, there aren’t just 24 time zones) and the themes are surely something to look forward to. It’s price tag will also see an ‘update’ - we are going from three to four dollars per personalized copy.

Regarding the website, before I am launching Main, I want to appeal to the people buying, so I got that online as a priority. Take a look at the elegant new ‘buying’ page;

I look forward to releasing Cocoia Main and the work I did with various developers on icons and interfaces. My own work too, of course, and everything I wanted to share with the world for a long time. It’s going to be an exciting time.

Staff pick!

Ended up on MacNN, the MacReviewCast and some other sites, and now an Apple.com iTunes+iPod staff pick! I am very honoured. Let’s put it up here for history’s sake. I feel like the day I was featured as a daily deviation on deviantART!

Very cool. I’ll update the website soon, with all these honorary mentions. Keep providing input via MacUpdate, and iusethis (I love this site) and here, of course.

This is really a blast.

I haven’t had a 1.0 release before so publicly, and I must say I am totally lyrical. The first few copies of Stealth have just gone out the door, so I can take a break customizing. The first day has been successful in sales and I want to thank everyone for buying or inquiring about it! Some feedback has been given about the site too, and for that, I am putting up a demo soon, and more information about what it does, why you would want it, and more. It’s up on several websites now, so AppUpdate and other ’smart’ package-receipt aware applications will pick up all updates in the future.

You guys are really supporting me. Thanks a lot for the hits, the visits, the input, and buying the product.

Well, I guess you all know what day it is…

I think you’d better just go here and download the demo.

I am having issues setting up Kagi and my credit card, but as you can see on the buy page, you can email me if you’re dying to get in on this limited edition skin and personalized edition - we can surely send money over regular bank accounts or paypal before the credit card payments work. I’ll get this all settled in the next few days, as well as perhaps add a second demo with another theme. Give me some input, okay? And enjoy!

Anyone on the iTunes team?

So, people, if you do make something that puts images on iPods in great, great quantities, then make sure you do it foolproof. Today, we can really virtually checksum files without computing cost to check their integrity. Hell, anyone who can make a shell script can verify if a copy operation succeeded by checking file size and attributes. Apparently, the iTunes team didn’t really deem this necessary (although you have full permission to flame me if you classdumped iTunes and found contrary evidence). The image above shows a, well, slightly recurring problem that can happen with the Photo sync of iTunes. It seems to be quite versed in producing corrupt images or even leaving some data of the old image in place, if the names were alike. I am going to dig deeper into this to see if I can make it reproducible.

I have tested this with GIF’s (which produce non-working images), PNG (native format of Timezones, makes these weird green bands seen above) and JPG’s, who create familiar ‘bolts’ artifacts and some very pretty colors and gradients that you haven’t bargained for. Perhaps, no, really, I might make an app that does this whole Photo syncing instead of iTunes. This is just too bad to be usable.
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News for early adopters of Cocoia Timezones.

The War on Bad Design being started and all, I think our iPod friends should get armed. Like, to the teeth. Pretty themes and innovative functionality, easy to navigate. Now cheaper, for this little while, and you get some extra’s! Be prepared for release…

Timezones 1.0 release announcement.

Okay, people, I am gearing up for the final release. I am taking ten days to do the necessary bugfixes and tweaks, and here is a preview of things to come (one of them being the very hot black theme) and the official release date announcement. Since there were also a few questions over at MacUpdate, I will answer them in this post as well.

You can download the beta here for evaluation purposes. The final version will have a demo, but it will be somewhat restricted.

Questions:

Timezones has no clear purpose. It’s no world clock. It’s no world map. What is it?
A: Cocoia Timezones was made to navigate timezones and quickly find out what time it is where. There being no open API for iPod development, the world map is made ‘interactive’ by making a series of images you can scroll though. The ‘world clock’ terminology was a mess-up from my side, and I’m sorry for that.

Why does the installer ‘phone home’?
A: It doesn’t. If you were to carefully scrutinize it, you can see the installer is fetching the first image of the installation process - namely a how-to for the installation. After that, no more connections are made, and nothing else is transferred. The internet image was embedded to later be replaced by a notice that the beta has expired and is deprecated.

(insert feature that isn’t in timezones here) isn’t in Timezones. Why?
A: There is no open iPod API for developing software.

I hope this clears it all up a bit. I hope you are enjoying the beta and look forward to perhaps a small beta update and the final release.