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!

Ah, I remember the day when Lights Off was released, the first truly native game for (jailbroken) iPhones. With not even a rumor about Apple’s now legendary and infamous App Store, the game was available for free through the somewhat clandestine Installer app. Designed by Adam Betts and developed by the now Apple-employed Lucas Newman, Lights Off was not only a joy to play, but also beautifully designed.

It made me incredibly excited about the prospect of native games on the iPhone. Fantastic iPhone-worthy design coupled with addictive games was a reality I couldn’t imagine. That turned out to be a positive limitation on my brain, since the introduction of the App Store has brought about mostly horribly ugly (yet sometimes quite playable) games. It’s Ramp Champ that brought me back to those good thoughts, though.

Continue reading…

For the next week, Icon Resource will be a full 30 euro cheaper – over 35% off – in anticipation of the announcement of Icon Resource 2.0. The second version of Icon Resource will be a sizable update with a slew of new ‘courses’, which are all free for existing members.

Keep an eye on the blog for the big announcement and preview of all the new content, resources, and features. I can’t wait to show off some of the great stuff that’s cooking!

A note to all folks that are purchasing the membership this week: I will be unavailable this weekend, so support email and other inquiries will be unanswered until Monday.

After months of searching for a video converting app that would let me choose audio and subtitle tracks contained in the ubiquitous MKV format (which is very common for anime) and re-export it to an iPhone or PS3-ready video with or without burned in subtitles, I gave up. There simply wasn’t an app that would let me do it without undertaking at least 10 manual steps with dubious command-line software and a lot of script rummaging.

Then I found MKVTools. It’s not just super-fast (my previous alternative was Perian+Quicktime, which made gorgeous subtitles, but exporting literally took hours), but it also lets me pick audio/video/subtitle tracks, and 1-click convert it to something my iPhone can play. It’s free, to boot (a few advanced features like queuing are unlocked for a tiny 5 dollars).

The UI and the icon of the app are not that great, unfortunately. I can’t do much about the UI, but here are two nice icons so you can keep it in your dock without flinching. As a bonus, there is an alternative to the modern aluminium replacement icon in ‘toolbox red metallic’ included.

MKVTools replacement icons – 1.8 MB

MKVTools can be downloaded here. Icons are for personal usage only.

As I alluded to earlier today, Sean Patrick O‘Brien and I are working on the very first Mac application that will be released under the Cocoia ‘brand’: Composition. Composition allows you to take any image and get a pixel-perfect preview of iPhone’s default effects at regular home screen size and Settings/Spotlight small icon size. It also lets you look at your icon in a virtual home screen to achieve a native look (and yes, both iPhone and iPod touch home screens will be represented), and export it for further usage on websites and other materials.

Composition is not an icon generator or designer in any way; it is made for people who care about the way their icons look, and want to get a break from the horrible workflow of mashing previews of icons together in Photoshop. There will be several easy-to-access Photoshop templates accessible from the app, but the actual design work is left to applications that are excellent at that kind of work. It will also be completely free!

I will announce more news about it as the application nears the beta milestone; in the mean time, drop an email to this address to get a spot on the list.

Sometimes, I like to do a little bit of icon speed drawing. Like with my iWork.com icon goodie, I completed these icons in a short time of about 2 hours total. I really like the Palm Pre‘s web browser icon, so I speed-designed 3 of the nice-looking icons on the Pre’s launcher screen for usage on your Mac or PC.

They’re not amazingly detailed or even polished at their maximum size of 512 pixels, but that wasn’t my intention, either. Consider that a disclaimer before you start commenting that they don’t look nice enough to you at that size ;).

Pre Desktop icons – 2.2 MB

These icons are intended for personal usage and desktop customization only. Palm Pre, the Palm branding and its icons are © 2008-2009, Palm.