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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I featured Billings on my blog before, and it’s still my one and only application for time-tracking, invoicing, and pretty much everything in my workflow that isn’t about designing. When Alykhan Jetha of Marketcircle contacted me to join the beta of their iPhone companion application, I jumped at the opportunity. Now I can proudly display the first public images of this amazingly well-designed iPhone app, which will be available soon.

As a disclaimer: I did not design any aspect of Billings Touch.

As you can see, it has a sharp icon that resembles its desktop counterpart. Upon opening the app, you are greeted by its gorgeous main screen.

I can’t divulge much about it yet, but the app does pretty much everything I ever dreamed of having in my pocket for my on-the-go demands. I’ve even come to use its timer as a punch clock next to my computer so I can even more effortlessly pause or resume my time tracking when I go off to brew a nice cappuccino.

In short: the app syncs with your Mac database of Billings (and vice-versa, new slips and invoices you created and tick off on your iPhone get synced back to your Mac over the air), and every single nook and cranny is wonderfully designed, as I’ve come to expect from Marketcircle.

It also works great without the desktop app: as a standalone app, it’s already a very powerful set of tools to add to your workflow. You can follow Marketcircle or me on twitter if you want to know when Billings Touch hits the App Store.

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!

It’s that time again: A new big cat is upon us, and while it hasn’t brought about the rumored ‘Marble’ aesthetic, there’s been a lot of enhancements, tweaks, and improvements to the user interface and graphics of Mac OS X 10.6, commonly known as Snow Leopard.

After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.

Since Snow Leopard has quite a few interface changes and tweaks, I’ve organized them into four sections. I’ll kick off with the most visible changes, and round the article up with (very) minor tweaks that are hardly noticeable, but show us that Apple still hasn’t lost its touch.

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I got a lot of responses on my WWDC shirt post earlier, and since I got the first batch printed, I have some that I’d like to give away! By the way, people now in San Francisco for WWDC are eligible, but you have better luck buying one off me when you run into me this week.

In my last giveaway, I asked you to comment, blog, or tweet about my look at Billings. This time, I’d like to ask you to take a picture of my work in action; it can be an icon of interface I designed, a logotype, print work, or just your workspace using my icons or wallpapers (of which there are much more coming up soon!). Upload it to flickr (or another photo-sharing website) with the tag “cocoiagiveaway” and a link back to this post.

Leave a comment with the link, and be sure to fill the ’email’ field in the comment form with your actual email so I can contact you for address information when you win!

The deadline for entries is Sunday, June 14th. Winners will be announced next week.

A lot of people ask me about the ‘boring’ part of running a freelance shop, like time tracking, billing, and invoicing. My workflow is very simple, and for the last few years it has depended almost completely on one solid-as-a-rock app: Billings by Marketcircle.

As a nice extra, Marketcircle’s Ryan Cash and Alykhan Jetha were kind enough to allow an interview about Billings to supplement this look at my personal workflow and share some background on the application and great upcoming things for users.

You guys can also win a Billings license – details on that at the end of this article!

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