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.

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!

Via Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch.

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.

With the risk of turning this into a cliché story, I should say that this year has probably been one of the most significant in my life. I went from being a student on the Art Academy in Groningen to being a full-time, self-employed designer and consultant, supporting my life. The paradigm shift was enormous for me; although I am a fanatic follower of the Jobs and Shipley types, I could never, subconsciously, bend my head around the basic fact that you aren’t useless as a human if you don’t have some sort of official paper proving your competence. It was at the end of the last term of the second year that the professors of the Academy smashed some sense into me. They told me that if I work hard and support myself with my work, and I get the recognition in the real world, that education wasn’t holy. In the end, I guess I had a clue, because months (in Twelve past Twelve) before that, I wrote;

I really feel like I have a clear goal, a clear ambition, and I even think there is a way for me to work it all out into a practical solution that also incorporates some kind of mechanism to keep me running monetarily — perhaps it is an illusion, but I don’t believe in failure. This is not to say there is nothing for me to achieve; I do believe in doing the wrong thing is bad, but I think there is a choice in everything and a chance therein to learn. I’ve got massive projects looming on the horizon and it’s all about expanding just that; my personal horizons. Fuck the world for now, I’ve got business to do.

And I tended to that business… in the end, it felt like an epiphany. I got the feeling that I had found that spot in life where you are no longer looking for the joy, happiness or achievement and ambition, but you settle into a state of comfort about your life and dreams. It’s not all roses, though; having had a very profound sense of ambition throughout my life, it felt discomforting at times not to have some sort of ladder to climb on. Of course, everyone has their highs and lows.

So, 2007 is on its way out, and the new year is looking promising for me. If I could divulge my agenda, I would in a blink, as the most exciting meetings, assignments, and clients I could possibly look forward to are all scheduled; there is a raw assurance in iCal on my Mac that 2008 won’t be good, it will be absolutely kickass. In the next year, I will be traveling a lot more to countries, and so I hope to meet some of the blog regulars and people I admire. I have a few icon sets in the making that will see the light in the first month of the new year, and I have no doubt that the rest of the year won’t go without more freeware icon treats. I can proudly look at the last 356 days with the knowledge that I have found a passion in my life. And when the clock strikes 12 in my time zone, I’ll be raising my glass to all of you who helped make it possible. Thanks to you — it’s been a dream.

One of the furry perpetrators.

Several of these fuzzy small animals (which I had posted about before) inhabit my workplace. My iPhone also inhabits my workplace. I read it through thoroughly, and I can guarantee you Apple simply failed to factor in this force of nature: kittens. In the course of the afternoon lunchtime, I had my iPhone lying on a book, in my bookshelf. I was sitting on my couch, which sits next to this bookshelf. I was furiously working away on a few icons for the Forgotten Mainframe set when a sound broke me out of my working flow.

Thunk!

The perpetrators, who were located in a section of the shelf above the section where my iPhone (and book) was lying, decided it was a brilliant idea to jump down to the section below them, using the protruding area of the book as a stepping stone. Unfortunately, the impact of several kittens on the side of the book made it act like a lever, slinging my iPhone into the floor like a trebuchet.

Needless to say, I hurried to check on the device. I clicked it on, checked the screen - nothing seemed wrong. I put it in a safe place and gave the kittens an evil stare.

Kittens, however, work far more subtly in their destructive ways.

I got a phone call. The marimba ringtone of the iPhone permeated my office, the device buzzing. A big finger-inviting green ’slide to answer’ slider appeared on the lit screen. And then the terror began.

I tapped it. And I tapped it again, as if trying again would solve this problem of an iPhone touch screen changing into a regular vanilla screen. I rubbed it, gave it a hard reset. “Slide to Unlock”. Regardless of my sliding, it wouldn’t let me. The capacitive area behind the screen, sensing my fingers on the bottom half of my iPhone, was broken. The iPhone was now officially a paperweight.

Obviously, Apple doesn’t cover me since I live in the Netherlands, I hacked it, and they don’t like me in the first place (something about a molten Macbook Pro). Perhaps I’ll get a new one when I go to London in 2008, because yeah, that’s how much of a sucker I am.