UI Candy.

I never eagerly post products from my competitors or even friends, but my designer friend Josh Pyles has released UI Candy today, a beautiful resolution-independent set of glyphs for your apps, and I found the design too good to leave unmentioned. The webdesign is remarkable and eye-catching, but that shouldn’t distract from the strong set of pictograms in the pack.

I invite you to hop over to Josh’s UI Candy site and take a gander.

Latitude.

It’s been a while since I released the first mockups and some explanation behind my ‘Dream Browser’. Several developers have contacted me with the desire to develop it, and some have already actively begun programming whole aspects of it. I’m very pleased with the activity, and to help the efforts, I have decided to create a design document and a centralised website to manage the project development. There’s also a working name; Latitude.

For now, I have created some mockups of the full-screen browsing mode, with an automatically hiding toolbar and an image with a roughly mocked up set of tabs for the full-screen mode. Additionally, I’ve made a mockup for the history feature, activated with the ‘Time Machine’-like, which also shows the ‘expanded’ mode, which is quite similar to how Safari looks.

To get some critique and mostly misunderstanding out of the way; one of my primary goals in this browser interface is to minimalise the amount interface clutter, although it may not seem that way. I don’t want to eliminate tabs or add some sort of permanent sidebar; a browser should still be usable as we use it today. However, having multiple sidebars, menu’s, or even full overlapping views that are opened with widgets that are in wildly varying positions in the interface. This browser, as I outlined in the previous post, uses a sidebar to consolidate various features that are now scattered throughout a browser, and helps to reduce clutter by also adding elements like the conventional ‘tabs’ to the sidebar. The ‘expanded’ viewing mode, as shown in the ‘history’ interface mockup without a sidebar active, will be your preferred state for viewing content.

I’ll update this new category when the document finishes or to keep tabs on community activity. Thanks for all the input and hard work so far!

Monster Marketing

Great video of Wil Shipley’s presentation at the C4[1] conference in 2007. Wil Shipley’s the co-founder of Delicious Monster, which you may know for the media cataloguing application Delicious Library. Apart from being funny and very fun to watch, it’s an interesting presentation on hype, marketing, and making software.

Via Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch.

2007: Dawn.

The last post of 2007!

It was a cold day in March of this year (the sixth, to be precise) when I started the Cocoia Blog. It’s funny that with this post, I’ll probably contradict my first post on this blog; with this end-of-the-year post, I might just be turning this into a diary - at least a bit. March of that year was the dawn of an exhilarating chapter in my life.

Continue reading 2007: Dawn….

iPhone’s Fatal Flaw

Today (as if yesterday wasn’t bad enough) something bad happened. I think it was a plot, deliberately set up by the disturbing army of furry animals in my working environment.

Continue reading iPhone’s Fatal Flaw…

♥ Apple

Thanks a lot, guys!

End-of-Month roundup.

October 2007 has changed a lot around here; the blog redesign, a whole new series of posts and a very large increase in traffic for the fourth time (in the short while it’s been around). A small roundup of articles of the last month and thoughts on the ‘transition’.

The Delicious Library 2 preview I posted up has been followed up today by new screenshots over at Wired. I can’t say I am too impressed looking at the screenshots, but I guess only actually using an application makes for a good judgement.

My graphical look at Final Cut Server was followed up by quite a few emails concerning Apple’s ‘icon rage’ lately. It seems Leopard’s gotten a lot of love (save perhaps the Expose and Spaces icons) but some applications were left out with pretty bad icon work.

And then there was the Dock frenzy after Leopard hit the stores; in the meantime, we’ve seen large-scale customization and even complete disabling of the newfangled Dock. Some (slightly) acceptable modifications struck my eye on Macthemes’ forum today (click images to go to the release in question);

I still have my fingers crossed for a nice application that lets you customize the Dock easily - perhaps I’ll even start using it again.

With a few other minor posts this month, I’d say it has been a very nice lineup of news, curious little developments and interesting things. Your input on how I have been changing the blog is welcome as always, although I’ll mention in advance that I intend to keep up the posting as you’ve seen lately, with occasional personal bits in between a succession of the things that pique my interest.

Getting luckier by the day.

Filevault’s image got corrupted. This means, essentially, that I risk losing a lot of data and I can’t use my regular account/ I can’t log in to my account now, although I can mount the image with some trouble. Time to back up and do a fresh reinstall of Tiger. Anyway, all updates deferred. Wish me luck.

I will be checking out CCC this year!

The Chaos Communication Camp is coming up, an excellent time to catch up with some like-minded people, be in the sun with your computer and walk into lectures, workshops, tesla generators, and more insanely cool stuff. I’ve checked out the 2003 video (this one), and it seems to be a very nice camp.
Topic for this year are;

* flying and non-flying autonomous robots
* security, encryption and anonymity
* software projects
* technologies for the day after the climate change
* rapid prototyping and fabbing
* software and hardware for disaster-resistant infrastructure
* bringing broadband to the countryside
* politics and propaganda
* anti-crowd-control tactics and technologies
* lock picking
* alternative energy systems
* citizen surveillance, data mining technologies, and social networks
* data forensic methods
* all things radio (preferably digital)
* self-sustaining and -reproducing hardware
* pollution free transport systems
* hacker anthropology and sociology of the scene
* flying cars, saucers and carpets
* 42
* tesla generators
* telecommunication technologies
* FPGA based analysis
* military technologies
* all kinds of voting computers
* ebooks
* satellites and rockets

I didn’t make an understatement with the term ‘insane’, did I? Be sure to check out the video, and I will be preparing all sorts of nice stuff for the CCC. I am planning, perhaps a lecture, or a workshop. At least, I will deal out some of my fonts, for free, on nicely designed CD’s. Also, some exclusive layered gimp files if the GIMP guys decide to be there as well, this year. Absolutely looking forward to it!

OS X 10.4.9; first (stupid) impression.

Apple has released 10.4.9, and it’s already incredibly intelligent;

What? No? You want sudo with that? I’m already annoyed, although the .9 could indicate this is the last update, for now. When will we see Leopard?