Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
Back in August, I wrote a post teasing Mailbox, the new app from the team behind Orchestra. Today, they’re ready to reveal a bit more. The video above offers a taste, but I’ll have more thoughts to share later on.
Put simply: this is the most excited I’ve been about an app in a long time. I’ve been testing it out for a few weeks now and it’s already the app I use most often. I say this, of course, as a happy investor, but I shit you not: if you hate email, you’re going to love this app when it comes out in a few weeks. It’s fucking amazing.
“If you hate email, you’re going to love this app”. I’m sold.
Last week while we were in NYC for Behance’s 99% Conference I fell in love with Visual Supply Co’s new VSCO CAM iPhone app. With minimal processing options VSCO CAM does a great job emulating the film styles for the likes of Kodak Tri-X, Fuji Superia, Ilford HP5 and many others. Here are a few shots I captured while exploring the city. Follow me on Instagram for other examples.
Teehan+Lax just updated their iPhone mockup PSD to include all the new subtle design changes and details introduced in this week’s iOS 5. Overall not a lot has changed, but you can certainly tell that Apple spent a lot of time polishing and perfecting the details.
Predicting the future of September 16, 2011 back in 1987, Apple painted the vision of a tablet device with a natural language voice assistant. Exactly 24 years later Apple is only one month off their fictitious September 16, 2011 date with the release of the iPhone 4S and Siri.
Via Waxy.org
I can’t decide which one I like more, the app or the promo video.
Take a picture of yourself. Every day. Set reminders. Get into the habit. The more pictures you have, the better your Everyday app will be.
A collaboration of William Wilkinson, Oliver White, Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor
An iPhone shot through a glass plate of oil and water and filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Simple execution and beautiful results from Jessee Zanzinger.
What are you creating?
With the recent 4.2 update for the iPad and iPhone Apple quietly added a number of new features to mobile Safari. Mobile Safari now has direct support for the accelerometer, gyroscope, HTML5 web sockets, updated HTML5 form support, new Javascript data types, updated DOM events, and enhanced SVG and Canvas support.
Also it appears that mobile Safari now has far better support for @font-face switching from preferring SVG fonts to TTF fonts. This one change now opens up the door to using Google Fonts on the iPad without crashing the browser. With some initial testing it looks like I’ll be able to update the Inspire Well theme to re-enable the use of Google Fonts on the iPad.
From the comments:
@font-face has worked for a long time on iOS given some specific caveats. However, the new news on web fonts in 4.2 is that iOS now prefers the TTF version of a font over the SVG version (formerly SVG was the only format supported.)
The other nice thing about web fonts on 4.2 is that they now work in offline webapps. This was a big deal for me and I only discovered it by luck. Still; this will be a pretty handy feature for a lot of folks I think.
Great discussion on the time that goes into development, design and most importantly polish when developing iPhone apps. This reminds me of many discussions I’ve had with clients over the years educating them on the cost that goes into creating sites and campaigns.
New York interactive agency Honest launched an iPhone app for Max Brooks’ series of zombie books, such as “The Zombie Survival Guide”. Although it’s a fairly basic app the execution and details are well done.
One word: Friction
“Through casual research I’ve discovered that on average an Apple users jeans are 33% tighter than a PC user, and a shocking 90% tighter than a Linux user. Apple fans are also hamstrung by a lack of cargo pockets on their pants that these other users enjoy. The problem is bad with a pair of Earnest Sewns, and becomes increasingly critical when I switch to, say, my Levis 501 XX Shrink to Fit 1947 Selvedge Cone Denim.”
Barbarian Group’s take on what went wrong with the bumpers.
Via @seth_weisfeld
Absolutely impressive sales for the first month of tap tap tap’s Camera+ iOS app. Their post on the Camera+ app sales is a great article full of advice on the importance of great design, attention to detail, fun elements, and international support.
Reblogged from Cameron Moll
Robert Scoble’s high definition photo of the iPhone 4. Taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Click to see full-size (5616 × 3744 pixels).
Reblogged from Jay Robinson
Currently there’s a race to the top (or bottom depending on how you view it) to churn out a large quantity of iPhone/iPad apps at cheap prices to break into the top downloads. Rather than focusing on how to break into the top downloads iTeleport worked to maintain their quality and kept their app at a premium price of $25.
How did we get here? We believe it’s a combination of creating a high quality product with great support in a well-defined market with significant demand. This doesn’t sound too different from classic definitions of how to develop a successful software business, and it’s not. … That, combined with offering something people really want, and are willing to pay a premium for if you give them distinctive, useful, hard-to-find features in return.
Yesterday Bobby Solomon of Kitsune Noir pointed out several references supporting the Dieter Rams design inspiration for the 4G iPhone design. Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer that helped shape Functionalist style of consumer electronics for Braun and other electronics companies during the 1960’s. The key principal of the Functionalist school of design is that the design should be created based on the purpose of the product or architecture.
Rams once explained his design approach in the phrase “Weniger, aber besser” which freely translates as “Less, but better.”
For quite some time now it has been said that Apple’s industrial designer Jonathan Ive has been influenced by Rams’ design, and in the case of the 4G iPhone this is quite apparent.
Last week Apple updated their iOS application policy requiring all apps to be written with their version of C or JavaScript essentially baring all of the 3rd party cross-compilers like Flash CS5 Titanium, Gambit Scheme, MonoTouch, and Unity3D. In the middle of the heated debate surrounding the future of the platform, Flash, and developers, co-founder of 37signals, David Hansson makes an excellent case against 3.3.1.
