Ah, I remember the day when Lights Off was released, the first truly native game for (jailbroken) iPhones. With not even a rumor about Apple’s now legendary and infamous App Store, the game was available for free through the somewhat clandestine Installer app. Designed by Adam Betts and developed by the now Apple-employed Lucas Newman, Lights Off was not only a joy to play, but also beautifully designed.

It made me incredibly excited about the prospect of native games on the iPhone. Fantastic iPhone-worthy design coupled with addictive games was a reality I couldn’t imagine. That turned out to be a positive limitation on my brain, since the introduction of the App Store has brought about mostly horribly ugly (yet sometimes quite playable) games. It’s Ramp Champ that brought me back to those good thoughts, though.

Continue reading…

It’s no secret to my Twitter followers that I’ve been very involved in games for the last few years, and I’m happy to announce that a part of my working time goes to UI and concept design for a game company. Apart from a lot of fancy interfaces (yay, holograms) I’ve been doing environments for an upcoming science fiction game, and I’m very excited with one I’ve come up with and was allowed to share: the Captive Planet.

The Captive Planet is a planet rich in natural resources, a valuable asset in any star system that’s just begging to have its riches extracted. Appearance-wise, it’s somewhat similar to Mars, but with its denser atmosphere and extremely hot temperatures, that’s about the only similarity they have. It’s mined by Hephaestus, a ‘wall’ that spans the entire circumference of the planet, and contracts into itself as it scrapes layer after layer off the surface of the planet, leaving behind little more than dust. Hephaestus is a crawling city, inhabited by miners and their families.

In the game, the player gets stranded on the Captive Planet at some point and is presented the harsh realities of living in ‘the Wall’ and choices that will determine the future of the planet and its inhabitants. I’m having lots of fun with this assignment, and I hope to keep you guys in the loop with several other very cool environments and designs I’m creating.

It’s that time again: A new big cat is upon us, and while it hasn’t brought about the rumored ‘Marble’ aesthetic, there’s been a lot of enhancements, tweaks, and improvements to the user interface and graphics of Mac OS X 10.6, commonly known as Snow Leopard.

After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.

Since Snow Leopard has quite a few interface changes and tweaks, I’ve organized them into four sections. I’ll kick off with the most visible changes, and round the article up with (very) minor tweaks that are hardly noticeable, but show us that Apple still hasn’t lost its touch.

Continue reading…

I’m one of those people who hates Flash with a passion. Not only did it make your Mac browser crash a lot in Leopard, it also used disproportionate amounts of CPU time and made your laptop heat up like a stovetop. It’s virtually impossible to not use Flash online, though – it’s mostly Youtube that forces me to use it on a daily basis.

What if I told you that Youtube’s Flash requirement could be history? Somehow I missed the news that ClickToFlash, a brilliant open-source plugin I’ve been using for a while, now has a setting that will load all Youtube videos (including HD content!) in Quicktime instead of Flash.

It even allows reliably skipping portions of the video without having it completely loaded. This is a feature that didn’t work for me in Flash most of the time. I’m donating to the project, as it’ll probably keep my computer running cool and stable for the years to come. I suggest you do too!

I just recently got my hands on a mouse I used and loved over eight years ago, and it forced me to reconsider an experience I have taken for granted for a very long time: using a particular mouse with my computer. In this post I detail me falling in love again again with a mouse from my younger years, and ask some of my friends about the way they use their mice.

I can’t design without one. Some people use tablets for this, but I can not wrap my mind around using a ‘pen’ for pointing at stuff on a screen. Even with my Cintiq, I find it rather annoying and clunky to use the Mac OS X or Windows UI. Try double-clicking with a tablet pen if you want a good example of why the computer interfaces of today are made for mice, and not digitizer pens.
Continue reading…

For the next week, Icon Resource will be a full 30 euro cheaper – over 35% off – in anticipation of the announcement of Icon Resource 2.0. The second version of Icon Resource will be a sizable update with a slew of new ‘courses’, which are all free for existing members.

Keep an eye on the blog for the big announcement and preview of all the new content, resources, and features. I can’t wait to show off some of the great stuff that’s cooking!

A note to all folks that are purchasing the membership this week: I will be unavailable this weekend, so support email and other inquiries will be unanswered until Monday.