A while ago Buck Wilson, the designer in a small team of Portland-bound guys, contacted me about icon design for Here, File File!, an iPhone app that lets you connect back to your Mac from anywhere and read, view, and stream your files. As opposed to the popular Dropbox and iDisk apps, it allows full access to all the files on your Mac, instead of just a few hand-picked ones.

I happily started working for them to make a kick-ass icon. There was an additional challenge as multiple icons were required: a Mac icon, a menubar icon, and an iPhone icon, which required a metaphorical connection between all of them. Buck mentioned they had an idea for using a doghouse for the Mac app and a dog with files on the iPhone, but I recommended against using animal motifs. Not only do we have the classic divide between ‘dog people’ and ‘cat people’ to worry about; animal motifs are just not very suitable in iPhone icons.

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Update: Get the updated version.

As there’s a tendency lately to release lots of (often less-than-pixel-accurate) PSD templates of iPad UI elements, I’ve decided to work with my good friend, Sean Patrick O‘Brien to create a PSD based off the exact overlays, outlines, and masks the iPhone and iPad OS use to mask icons.

This lets you preview the pre-supplied gloss, or modify it. It’s made up entirely of shape layers and layer effects and should be completely pixel-accurate. If you use it, credit is welcome — it’s not required, though.

iPhone and iPad PSD icon template – 545 KB

I’d appreciate it if you let others know about the PSD if you grab it. Tweet this or blog it. Thank you!

iPhone Resource will obviously have templates like this with actual sample icons (and some recreated Apple icons) once it’s out. Consider this a small goodie until iPhone Resource and Composition is out (yes, the latter is in development, but it’ll take much longer than expected).

Mike Matas is a very talented 23-year old designer from the United States, currently living in San Francisco. He’s best known for his design work on the original Delicious Library, and working at Apple, designing key parts of Mac OS X and iPhone OS. He’s even been listed as co-inventor on patents Apple has filed.

In 2009, he left Apple. Lately, he uploads the fruits of his also impressive photography skills to his website and blog, mikematas.com.

I’ve asked him a few questions in this interview to learn more of one of the designers of the most innovative and beautiful interfaces of the last decade. Unfortunately, he wasn’t willing to disclose what he’s working on these days, but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of quality design from his hand in the future.

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Armin Vit posted about the now-in-beta Office 2010 on Brand New, a blog about branding. Naturally, they showed off the new(-ish) Office 2010 branding, and, unsurprisingly, the application icons of Microsoft’s latest version of Office.

I wanted to share a few of my observations on the new icons and the history of Microsoft Office and its icons.

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Warships, a game designed by me and developed by the Canadian Edovia is now available on the App Store. It’s a great, simple game of naval conflict, and I had a lot of fun designing it. You should get it (while it’s still a mere $1!) here.

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!

Perhaps you’re aware that you can connect to a Mac back home with Back to my Mac, a service offered by MobileMe. When I heard of this feature, I did some reading and set everything up right, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I think Back to my Mac is a really cool idea, but it could use some work. It could even tie very well into Apple’s possible new tablet-sized device.

Enter MobileMe Home. After entering your MobileMe credentials on your Airport or Time Capsule, your network becomes accessible when you’re away from home. No enabling settings in some tab in a preference pane or forgetting to put a file on your iDisk: you can connect back home from anywhere with the Finder on your laptop, with an iPhone app, and from public or other computers through the MobileMe web interface.

MobileMe Home’s web interface allows you access to your Mac’s files, use a web-based client to do simple screen sharing, stream a few songs or videos from your iTunes library, and locate, wake, sleep or shut down your Macs from anywhere. On any Mac or iPhone, you can connect to your network to do all of the above, and more, like connecting to a non-Mac server or device on the road.

Even better, since your laptop (and possibly tablet) get on the move, you can track its location thanks to Snow Leopard’s Core Location features.

Check out a larger size of my rough MobileMe Home mockups at Flickr by clicking the preview below:

MobileMe Home is not an official Apple product, nor do I know anything of planned features of MobileMe. You should consider this an idea, or perhaps even a dream, seeing how technically MobileMe Home would probably be incredibly hard to implement. I just wanted to share it with the world.