With its .99 dollar sale price and upcoming 2.0 update, Groceries warrants a blog post. I’ve worked with Sophia to make a few icons for this great, polished iPhone app. I can’t go to the supermarket without it anymore.

If you’re not so sure about why you’d want to have a shopping list application on your iPhone, you can do what I did; go through your iPhone notes and discover a few dozen old shopping lists, and then reminisce about that last time you were in the store and wanted to add something to the list. Kind of annoying, isn’t it? Groceries has almost all possible items you can encounter while you’re out shopping in its database, and lets you add them to the list with but a few virtual keystrokes or taps.

Grab Groceries (link opens iTunes) for $ 0.99 during its sale.

And yeah, doing some testing of layout features of Cocoia Blog 3.1 here. If you see general weirdness ensue, please bear with me or report the weirdness to me via Twitter or email.

My 21st birthday is a few days away. Contrary to the previous years, where I posted on my birthday and occasionally reflected on the past, the way I live and work today is far more oriented towards what is yet to come, and as such I won’t do that again this year. 2008 was a great year for me, and 2009, so far, has not been any different. I won’t be posting about my birthday on April 29th; instead, I’ll be posting some new downloadable goodies on that date. For now, I want to look forward; there’s a pretty elaborate schedule ahead.

Apart from small and large clients that have booked my time, I’ll be in San Francisco in June for WWDC – with no conference ticket; I am really not doing so well that I can pay a whopping 1300 dollars for some days of networking with people, although I do intend to meet up with as many of you as I can – and the Fall season will involve one or more trips to Japan and possibly other asian countries. I also hope to show off some great work I have done in the last few months in May / June.

Regarding Asia, I am not sure why, but my Japanese (and Chinese) website traffic has been increasing tremendously (こんにちは!), and I have gotten a lot more Japanese clients as well. Perhaps my learning Japanese has something to do with it, although I haven’t talked about that a lot; Japanese culture fascinates me, and I am pleased with being able to get closer to it. I’ll probably be showing off some videos of my work for Japanese companies in the Fall of 2009.

And then there’s this blog. While my writing dwindled a bit under the stress of some extended projects, I will be finishing a lot of blog posts in the next weeks. I will preview the next version of Icon Resource (new course material is free for existing members), release a small new icon set, and talk about iPhone icons and the iPhone OS 3.0’s new color profile, which I have investigated. I will also publish an article about my own billing and accounting workflow complete with an interview with the guys that provide my top billing solution: Marketcircle, and, best of all, several nice software (and hardware) giveaways are coming up.

Due to this, I’m now also entering a partnership with the cool guys at Fusion. I have never considered advertising on my blog, but Fusion has a beautiful format and shows products I use and love as well. I think it’d also suit the blog and your sensibilities as a reader. Your input on this is of course welcome. I hope you enjoyed this peek at what’s in the pipeline!

Currencies by iPhone app maker Edovia (known from Apple TV ads featuring Rocket Taxi) has been submitted to the App Store. It was a real joy working with Luc on this simple, straightforward, yet powerful currency converter.

I’m not sure about you, but before I had a build of Currencies on my iPhone, I used Google for my conversions between ten and twenty times each day (thanks to American clients and my love for Japanese collectibles). I am very happy to have something much more elegant now, and I’m eager to see this application hit the App Store to read user feedback.

It’s available right now, for $0.99 in the App Store: Click here to go open iTunes and go straight to the application page.

While working on Currencies, I also made some images of my new workspace. I get a lot of questions over email or twitter about the way I got my desk set up, and it’s been moved in such a way that I can now fully enjoy this year’s summer season without having to suffer ‘withdrawal symptoms’ from not being with my dear workstation. I got some really neat Japanese figures and mecha set up on it (some from Japanese clients), which I will blog about sooner or later.

Click here to go to Flickr and see more images of the figures and angles of the workspace. This setup with the Wacom Cintiq is really enjoyable; I can just put aside the bluetooth keyboard and (not-so-mighty) mouse and then just draw and doodle at my leisure. Splendid.

I love games. Most of the time, I play fast-paced, exciting, enthralling, or scary games that have my heart racing and keep my adrenalin levels high. For once, however, I got the chance to play a game that departs from this convention. Flower, a Playstation Network title and a PS3 exclusive, is a game that’s — believe it or not — actually relaxing to play.

This may sound really boring, like describing a fancy new version of Mahjong for the game console, but it’s really not. I found Flower to be a uniquely captivating experience.

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Apple’s iPhone software 3.0 event came and went without a mention or hint at new hardware. There have been a lot of rumors about a possible new iPhone, and a lot of these rumors assumed a potential connection between this new software for the iPhone and the new hardware, which could be unveiled around the time of WWDC this year.

I posed a question on Twitter earlier today, and since there’s (unsurprisingly) been no mention of it today, I wanted to get my thoughts down on this difficult issue Apple faces when it comes to the future of the iPhone platform. At some point in the future, iPhones and iPod touches will get a better screen, with a better resolution. A good example is the move of Apple’s flagship notebook, the Macbook Pro 17″, from a 1680 by 1050 pixel resolution screen, to a high-DPI (dots per inch) screen boasting an impressive 1920 by 1200 pixels. The screen remained the same size in inches; it just packed a lot more pixels in each inch of screen size.

This happens in the arena of mobile devices as well. Some modern cell phones feature screens with a massive resolution of 800 by 600 pixels; comparably, the iPhone offers a ‘meagre’ 480 by 320 pixels. In the future, Apple will change to a better (not necessarily ‘bigger’) screen, and developers of iPhone apps will face a huge issue: how do we scale the interface?

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