When I was about 11 years old, I used to read a Dutch gaming magazine called ‘PC Gameplay’. It introduced me to gaming in general, and it also brought me into the world of trying games out instead of dismissing them at first glance. I made a resolution not to assume anymore that something was not my type of game; after the astonishing experience that was Baldur’s Gate, you tend to start looking for other immersive and amazing gems in gameplay.

That same magazine ran a review of System Shock 2 in October 1999, and I was amazed. Not because I thought it’d be such a great game, but because just the pictures and the review scared the living daylights out of me. It took me almost 4 years to gather all the guts I could muster and try the demo. I never realized I was in for an experience that’d return to me repeatedly in the 5 years to come.

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Wipeout HD is an exclusively downloadable title for the PS3. I think that it’s actually the first title of such a large franchise to hit the Playstation Network (PSN in short) Store while not being available in regular brick-and-mortar retail outlets. You’d start to wonder why exactly, as there’s people like me who’d certainly pay for Wipeout HD on shiny Blu-Ray, the PS3’s defacto disc format.

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Just under 20 hours before the official release of the new iPhone 3G, Apple’s opened the doors to the App Store. A lot of great apps are already available, and I wanted to share my selection of fantastically designed and useful apps that you can grab when you update your current iPhone (or even better, get a new 3G iPhone).

All of these applications are linked to the iTunes Store, so click the link to proceed to their iTunes page with screenshots and other information.

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I have been noticing a disturbing trend in custom interface design of third party applications for Mac OS X. As it is no longer an exception for software developers to build interface elements that are entirely unique to their application, the threshold for customizing other, system-standard interface elements is also lowered significantly. The ghastly trend I am about to describe is in existence due to this lowered threshold. In fact, I think this particular deviation off the beaten interface path would have been far more frowned upon a few years ago, when Mac interface designers were more conservative in using custom UI elements in general, and Apple disapproved of it more fiercely. Today, however, it won’t even stand in the way of scoring a design award runner-up, as my examples will go to prove.

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The day has come, and Icon Resource, the biggest project I’ve spearheaded since the start of my own company has gone live. You can now go to the Icon Resource website to watch a sample video, read more about the contents, or acquire your access to the polished Icon Resource member area.

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While I was doing some research for one of my upcoming projects today, I found the very first Photoshop icon. It’s actually a tiny little photo shop! I love it, and if I have some free time I’ll see if I can recreate it in a more modern style.

What particularly strikes me is that they’ve gone through great lengths to let anyone be able to determine what it is; the ‘1HR’ signage obviously indicates the ‘photo’ part in ‘Photoshop’ and the man with the teller is the ‘shop’ part. Very, very cool.

Edit: Addendum with the History of Photoshop, and color versions of these pre-Photoshop 1.0 icons. Be sure to check out John Knoll’s response in the comments down here.