On March 30, I raised quite a few questions on Twitter when I changed my handle from the old @cocoia to @sdw — a shorthand for my full name, Sebastiaan de With. I also bought (and put some pages up for) domains like dewith.com and sebdw.com. I mentioned that I’d announce my motives sometime in the future. Some people speculated I was going to expand Cocoia, others (interestingly relevant today) assumed Cocoia was acquired.

It’s none of the above. I’m putting Cocoia in carbonite for a while as I start my first full-time job in the United States: I will be joining doubleTwist as Chief Creative Officer, responsible for overseeing and working on the design, interaction and polish of all their apps and services. I’ve been working with the awesome people at doubleTwist as a freelancer for years now and I’m really, really stoked to give them my full attention. We’ve been working on some extremely cool stuff.

I’ve interviewed with over a dozen companies early this year, and my joining doubleTwist is the conclusion of a long period of weighing all the awesome opportunities I had. You may have seen me traverse all the valley campuses on social networks as I ‘shopped’ around. A luxury problem if there ever was one: picking a job from all these kickass companies. doubleTwist is undoubtedly the best choice, though: working with Jon (– of ‘DVD Jon‘ fame) and Monique has always been a pleasure, and the other staff are some of the most detail oriented and talented I’ve known in the industry.

In related news, I will be moving to San Francisco soon. As a city, it’s a fantastic place to live. As a place, it’s where I truly feel at home out of all the places in the world. I can’t wait to be living and working there.

What does this mean to you, my reader and / or customer, and my ‘behavior’ online? Icon Resource and other Cocoia products will still be supported and developed. I will still work on side projects, UI breakdowns, speak at conferences and (loudly) voice my opinion on things. I will be working more with Android (and possibly, as they emerge, more mobile OSes).

I will, however, no longer accept freelance work. After six years of freelance designing, this is truly the end of an era. Thanks to all my awesome clients, large and small, and my ‘competitors’ for being awesome inspiring designers I was proud to share a market with. You know who you are. I’m sure we’ll work together again in the future. For now, goodbye.

And, of course, I’ll be showing off some of the awesome things I’ve been working on for doubleTwist very soon.

Boy, it’s been a while. I really need to update everyone on what’s up and what’s coming up.

– I’ve been working hard for the Mothership for the last months (hence the blog silence) and really enjoying the big workload. I’m very thankful to work with a lot of extremely talented people.

To get misunderstandings out of the way: I have not closed up shop, I have not relocated, and I am not working on Mac OS X Lion. Phew! This is also the reason I am not doing UI roundups and the likes for iLife ’11 or doing elaborate commentaries on Apple products. I’ll announce what I’ve worked on when it’s released, though!

– There will be new designs for Icon Designer, Cocoia and this blog next year!

– Icon Resource 2 is still very much being developed! Due to Retina Display and other new developments I’ve added some more material to the curriculum which piled on the delay. I’m wrapping things up for this year, so you can spend 2011 making awesome icons and interfaces. I apologize for the delay, but it’ll be worth it.

– I’ve been doing a video series on Minecraft. Check it out: the newest part, due out this week, will be very intense. A teaser:

Check out the full series here.

– Remember Composition? Vaguely perhaps? There’ll be news on that. It’s out of my hands, since I’ve been unable to complete it, but… well, I’ll save the good news for when it’s applicable.

– Speaking of old posts: I’ll be hitting up Dreamhack Winter 2010 again, thanks to sponsors like Intel, HP and others who are facilitating Pack4Dreamhack (with full press access!). Are you there? Let’s meet! I’ll be doing another ‘packing’ post and a report from the floor.

– And, of course, there’s some neat blog posts coming up. Good Old Games on extremely small touchscreen devices? Check! Pointers on Android UI design? Check! And (hopefully) showing off some work I have been doing for a PC / PS3 / Xbox 360 game.

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.

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.

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.

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!

It took me a solid two days, but here I am reporting in from Jönköping, Sweden! I took a good amount of time to take a plethora of pictures, use my press access to get to hard-to-reach places, and select and edit photos to give you a nice impression of the crazy little universe that’s known as Dreamhack. If you didn’t read it in my last post: Dreamhack is the world’s biggest computer festival. Me and 12-15 thousand other geeks are here and try to make the best of it.

Apart from file sharing and playing games, there’s opportunities to compete in the so-called ‘eSports’ ladders, sit in a tank of the Swedish army, try and win laptops, play pre-release games like RUSE, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft 2, and much more. In fact, there’s so much to do that you’d probably be fine without a computer, but over tenthousand gamers with their box on one of the tables in Dreamhack’s many halls beg to differ. Read on for a link to the flickr set, my trip here, and impressions of the venue floor.

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