17 Dec
   Filed Under: News, Software Releases   

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.

Billings-Touch-Icon

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.

Billings Touch 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.

Billings Touch Timer

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.

12 Dec

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.

warships-the-game

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!

04 Dec
   Filed Under: Personal   

As promised, here is my video of this year’s massive Dreamhack Winter event. I didn’t even come close to visiting all the cool places, but it does give a great impression of the scale and fun of this event. I recommend the HD version of the video, available at Vimeo, for your viewing pleasure.

The music is ‘Nostrand’, by Ratatat, from the album Classics. Hope to see you at one of the many LAN-parties I will be attending in 2010!

03 Dec
   Filed Under: Goodies, Icon Design, Personal Work   

A quick replacement icon for Photoshop. Blue squares (or cubes) don’t really qualify as icons for me, and I’ve been going between replacement icons for too long. I just wanted something similar to the Apple-supplied developer tools’ icons, so here you go.

Photoshop-icon

Grab the icon here:

As usual, I’d like you to use it for personal computer customization only. Not endorsed by Adobe Systems Inc. in any way.

02 Dec
   Filed Under: News   

With this week’s headline of “Microsoft ‘worked with Apple’ for Silverlight on iPhone”, we’re once more reminded of the grim reality that is video on the internet. In the article, Microsoft proudly boasts how they use standardized H264-encoded video and a HTML5 video element to serve up video to the iPhone, which would otherwise refuse to play its proprietary content due to lack of a browser plugin.

Flash-Empire-DeathStar

Since the ages of the first images in web browsers, we’ve been eager to see full-motion video on the web. While it was first normal to let people download video files, often heavily compressed and only playable on specific systems, in the late 1990s, the increase of broadband adoption and standardization of internet protocols allowed streaming video to become commonplace. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Realplayer emerged as proprietary solutions for internet video streaming.

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