All Articles Tagged cocoia

Sebastiaan de With — aside from gritting his teeth and almost blinding himself in one eye while reproducing the incomprehensibly pin-striped logo above — has bent his design-focus and Cocoia blog towards an analysis of Apple’s new iPhone 3.0 user interface:

Sometimes, I’m considering if other companies in the cellphone / personal media player market have caught up to Apple’s care to details and design sensibilities, but then things like these make the reality very obvious to me:

Apple’s still the leader of the pack by several tail lengths.

If you’re into the details of user interface and design, give it a read and let us know what you think about the look and feel of iPhone 3.0.

We linked to a WWDC banner a few days ago that highlighted iPhone apps. Looks like it wasn’t alone. Cocoia Blog has posted a few more pictures, another on apps (covering the entire front entrance facade of Moscone Center, above), and one on iPhone OS 3.0. Not so many for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which simply retreads, and now has to share the “World’s most advanced operating system” tag. Check out the full post for more, but the disparity led them comment:

It does seem like the Mac is just a small side-note, though.

Since both run versions of OS X, and we’ve seen several times that technology from each one get factored back into the other (iPhone Quicktime is said to advanced Quicktime X for Snow Leopard), there’s no doubt plenty of work still going into both, but the emphasis may show where Apple thinks a lot of its future revenue and attention may lie…

Mac and iPhone icon designer Sebastiaan de With of Cocoia takes app designers to task for not making their icons better match the quality and look of Apple’s built-in apps. Says de With:

A lot of professional designers get it wrong as well, and I can understand; it’s truly very hard to make an icon that looks as great as one from Apple’s bunch and blends in with the rest. I don’t mean to be an icon snob; I like diversity in my icons, and especially creative freedom. It’s more than just annoying, however, when creative and diverse motifs look extremely alien to their environment.

Part of the blame is placed on Apple who’s iPhone HIG (human interface guidelines) provide a mere 378 words on icon design, with examples that are sub-par. But de With isn’t just complaining — he’s doing something about it. Enter: Composition:

Sean Patrick O‘Brien and I are working on the very first Mac application that will be released under the Cocoia ‘brand’: Composition. Composition allows you to take any image and get a pixel-perfect preview of iPhone’s default effects at regular home screen size and Settings/Spotlight small icon size. It also lets you look at your icon in a virtual home screen to achieve a native look (and yes, both iPhone and iPod touch home screens will be represented), and export it for further usage on websites and other materials.

Best of all, it’s going to be free.

Check out the pre-announcement for details.

We’ve spoken quite a bit before about the potential that Apple might one day “split the platform” with either an iPhone nano (very unlikely) or an iPhone HD (which we’ve been discussing quite a bit lately).

Right now, all existing iPhones and iPod touches sport 320×480 screens at 163dpi. The iPod nano, by contrast, was already at 202dpi during the previous, “fatty” generation. The BlackBerry Bold is at something around 217dpi. HTC is making 480×800 displays now like they’re going out of style.

At some point, the iPhone will jump to HD (by which we mean 480p, or 480×800) and current generation iPhone apps, and their associated bitmap interface elements just won’t look so good.

Cocoia, renowned icon and interface designer Sabastiaan de With’s blog, has an excellent post up today about that very issue. He says:

Applications will have to ‘deal’ with two different resolutions at the least; icons and other bitmap graphics will have to be redesigned for the higher pixel density screens. There will, no doubt, be applications that are not ready and look very bad on the new device, or perfectly good applications are not approved into the App Store because they are not ready yet.

We may keep pushing the date forward like a hot potato, but at some point Apple and developers will have to face up to the fact that there will be a lot of redesigning, re-thinking and adaptation required. Until that day, enjoy the simplicity of developing and designing for a simple, defined hardware specification. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when technology comes and slaps you in the face.

Apple has enjoyed huge success from the relatively unified hardware model as well, so here’s hoping they help developers not only prepare for, but transition to future resolutions as painlessly for them — and us — as possible. Any developers out there already pondering this?