12 Apr
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Icon Design, Personal Work   

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If you’re eager to hear a bit more about my work, my person, and the whole story with Apple, I recommend you listen to Pomcast’s latest English episode, where I and StuFF mc discuss Apple, graphical user interface design and a bunch of other things.

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04 Apr
   Filed Under: Announcement, Apple, Commercial Work, Design, Personal   

First off, let me thank everyone for such a great reception of Icon Resource. The first 24 hours of its existence were fantastically exciting, and I’ve gotten an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. I will consider all your input carefully. Now, I wanted to tell a story that relates a lot to, amongst things, Icon Resource and its genesis, but most importantly, radically changed the way I look at life and the things I feel strongly about.

It has been waiting to be written since late January of this year. It was around that time, late into the evening, in my brand new little office, that my laptop made the familiar ‘bling!’ sound of new mail. I got off from my chair, opened Mail, and found an email from a representative of Apple. They were wondering if I would be interested in a position at Apple in Cupertino.

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06 Mar
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Icon Design, Interface Design, iPhone   

zzzdk.pngApple has just revealed the new, open Software Development Kit for the iPhone. It’s an exceptional program, which had been pre-seeded to developers. It allows developers to create native applications for the device, which had been highly desired since the start.

I was reasonably tight-lipped about this because I got a stash of email from companies a while before the keynote of today. I’ve been working on iPhone apps with developers for a few weeks now, and as such, I had been expecting a reasonably fully fledged SDK to appear. A device that already astonished people worldwide will now perform almost any desirable function, in a beautiful and revolutionary way. We truly stand at the brink of a user experience and software development revolution.

An online friend, Leonardo Cassarani, said:

Imagine something like Delicious Library’s barcode scanning on iPhones. You could read users’ reviews of the product you’re considering buying. Or auto-update your delicious library via the web. How about keeping a wishlist as you go out for shopping, maybe record the store names and addresses so you can get back to it and buy it or integrate it with something like Amazon’s wishlist?

This is a perfect example of why this is going to change a lot of things in the software industry. Not to mention, the target audience of people owning an iPhone will soon be much larger than the audience of desktop software – especially Mac software.

Although it’s not looking great for application icons, currently (the ones in the presentation were mediocre at best), you can imagine my enthusiasm about creating interfaces for all these great new applications, with a more interactive usage model than ever before. New applications are even promised a way to poll the iPhone for its location, it’s acceleration and tilt – making a game that responds to the way you hold the device an ‘obvious idea’. Where there was a limited model of development first, it seems the only boundary right now is the creativity of the designers and developers working with this.

I would say I expect to see a lot of cool apps coming out in June, but fortunately, I won’t. I know for sure that we’ll see a lot of great apps in June.

Edit: Thomas made this funny point:

Your shopping-oriented examples are really just slightly modified versions of the same hoary old “imagine if you could buy a soda..with your phone” that we’ve been hearing forever… (entire comment)

I think that if you feel this way, you’re failing to see the implications to anything in the web and desktop application spectrum today. Social networking, content exchange, collaboration, and more of such concepts in software are about to be reinvented in ways oriented at the most pleasant interaction model in existence. There’s bound to be some great rethinking of rusty conventions and repairing of broken implementations of good ideas.

16 Feb
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Interface Design, Personal Work   

I got inspired by the iTunes sidebar today to mock up a browser interface that I had thought about for the last few weeks. In iTunes, a ‘hub application’ approach is taken to music and video content, simplifying and streamlining the experience from acquiring content, to organising and viewing it. I am aware of several ‘new generation’ browser projects, but none really line up with my ideas.

Let me show you what I came up with.

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12 Feb
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Interface Design, News   

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Following up on my previous post showing a few design novelties in OS X 10.5.2, here are some quick observations on novelties in Aperture 2.0, which Apple released just today, on flickr. The Apple Pro Apps design team has gone far on customizing the look and feel – you’ll barely recognize the Aqua interface!

12 Feb
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, News   

After playing around a bit in the newest version of Mac OS X Leopard, I was delighted to hear that there were several nice improvements to icons and interface elements. Here’s what I’ve found and seen so far;

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– Time Machine menu bar icon; when backing up, shows a beautiful animated clock with hands turning backwards, or when unable to back up, presents a tiny caution sign. Very nicely designed, clean, clear, and a great way to keep tabs on Time Machine’s activity.

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– iCal icon now localized; whereas the iCal icon got a new feature in 10.5, namely, dynamically showing the correct date on the icon, in 10.5.2, the three letter initials for the month in the top-left corner of the icon is also changed according to your locale. Via Fernando Lins.

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Sharepoint icon debacle; And then there’s the uglyness. The Share Point icon, first a folder with a globe overlaid, has been changed to a rather cheesy lineup of weird child-human-like shapes.

Apart from that, I’m glad that we now have an option to turn the menubar non-transparent (although I like transparency and would like to see that design concept mature like it did on the iPhone, i.e. a contextual menubar) and that drop-down menu’s are now slightly more opaque. Overall, this update brings some very nice new designs and details to grace your Mac interface.