16 Mar
   Filed Under: Commercial Work, Design, Icon Design, News   

Interarchy is a Mac app that’s almost as old as I am: it was first created in 1993 as one of the first FTP clients for the Mac, and in 2007 it was sold to its current owner and long-time developer of Interarchy, Matthew Drayton of Nolobe. Matthew contacted me with a request for new icons for the big upcoming version 10. This was no small release, so it had to be worth it.

Like several other FTP clients, Interarchy has always been known and discerned by its icon. By now, it’s a powerful brand. Matthew also expressed his desire to maintain the filing cabinet metaphor in the application icon, and I agreed. Changing the icon now would mean neglecting its long history and evolution.

Continue reading…

15 Mar
   Filed Under: Giveaways   

Razer, a manufacturer of ‘gaming’-class hardware has recently announced Mac support for their entire product line. It’s a badly kept secret that I’m a big fan of Razer’s offerings (particularly their mice), and that makes me especially happy to announce this giveaway.

To bring attention to Razer now considering the Mac platform a serious alternative to Windows for gaming, I’m giving away Razer’s flagship mouse, the Mamba. It’s a fantastic mouse, with wired and wireless modes (it even charges when you plug the wire in) and its design matches Mac hardware quite well. It retails for about $120.

And yes, you can disable that blue lighting in software.

I’m also throwing in a complimentary beta key for APB and a Source-engine game of your choice on Steam, like Counter-Strike: Source, Portal, Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life 2 (remember: Steam is coming to Mac in April!).

Retweet this post any time between today and Wednesday, March 17th to qualify. You should follow me on twitter here so I can DM you when the winners are picked. Winners will also be announced on my twitter and the blog April 2nd.

13 Mar
   Filed Under: Commercial Work, Design, Icon Design, iPhone   

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.

Continue reading…

11 Mar
   Filed Under: News, Personal Work   

Bricky, my shirt advocating a life without Flash on iPad and iPhone (or perhaps open video itself – or happy plugins? I guess everyone can make up their own meaning) is now ready to be delivered to your doorstep.

Bricky is a very limited run. There will be no re-prints, so get it now. Printed once more at very high quality by the fine lads of BuyOlympia on genuine American Apparel shirts.

10 Mar
   Filed Under: How-To, Personal   

I was asked to answer a few questions from you all on the Design Tea podcast, right on the heels of Tim van Damme.

(pardon the random image from the movie)

You can watch the whole thing here. If you do have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks to Linebreak for having me.

09 Mar
   Filed Under: Personal   

I tend to be harsh on Flash a lot, and I dislike it as much as the next standards-advocating (and technologically savvy) Mac user. Since I like putting my money where my mouth is, I decided to try going into February and not use Flash even once during all of its 28 days, inspired by Michael Heilemann‘s initiative to do the same. He even logged his difficulties, which I haven’t and won’t be doing.

Flash Free

For me, the conclusion after February was clear. I missed out on a few things that annoyed me intensely. Most of the things I missed out on were videos on websites like TED and the New York Times. I had some catching up to do after February. With the help of ClicktoFlash and Youtube and Vimeo’s HTML5 players I was able to watch most of the video content out there, but there is still a lot that you can’t watch without that little plugin. I also ‘missed out’ on a truckload of so-called ‘rich advertisements’, which I absolutely adored.

But the problem of going through your digital life without Flash it’s not just videos on otherwise accessible websites. Try browsing for motion design agency showreels and websites for new games without Flash. Some industries have a vested interest in Flash because it is a mature platform for graphic websites, despite advances in HTML + CSS + Javascript. And I can imagine; the Flash-less approach doesn’t only break down in some browsers, it’s simply not mature yet. Take a look at the current Macheist page. At the time of this writing, it is using 65 to 70 percent of the processing power in my early 2008 Mac Pro, equipped with eight Xeon cores.

Worse still, people hail these Flash-free websites as progress and the road to the future. With terrible performance and compatibility like that, I prefer Flash, despite its drawbacks and proprietary nature. Actually using these technologies and advacing the state of the art is great, but I hope it doens’t put these upcoming standards in a bad light. It’s worth noting, however, that a lot of these techniques are in their infancy.

I’ll be happy with a more efficient and well-performing Flash plugin for Mac, but what I want above everything is a access to the of data that is used by web plugins. It’d be great if I would’ve been able to at least view the motion agencies’ showreels (which are all in Quicktime) and read a bit about games or view some screenshots without requiring a plugin. If I do want to opt into the so-called ‘rich’ web experience, I’ll use Flash, Silverlight, or Web Plugin #4512 to render blinking text and videos projected onto cubes which fall down the screen and bounce around using realistic physics.

Microsoft Labs is doing great things with Silverlight that aren’t possible with Javascript and modern standard-based technologies (yet?), like Pivot, which was demonstrated at TED this year (Flash video – sigh). Pivot’s data, however, for at least half of the video, is the actual web, built on standards and accessible to any technology. This way, if another superior technology comes by or a plugin is no longer supported, anyone can harness the power of the existing data to replicate or even improve on the functionality that we’re so accustomed to. I like that.

There is nobody stopping you from making an iPad or iPhone application using Core Animation which browses Wikipedia like Pivot does – try doing that with all the video that is on the internet.

In conclusion, I’m actually happy to use Flash again to get at all the content I want. I’m equally happy to have missed out on the drawbacks of Flash. While before February I was convinced Flash had no place in the world, I am now a bit more relaxed about it. Flash has its place – but we shouldn’t lose track of the real goal: making the data we want to interface with accessible regardless of the technology I have on my computer, be it a phone, tablet, or PC.