Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

iPhone icons

Jun 9th, 10 / 0 Comments

Here are some lovely PSDs available for download; excellent for picking apart how to create great iPhone icons:

http://christianbaroni.me/?page=downloads

(Found via http://twitter.com/flyosity/status/15798736074.)

This will be important for iPhone apps but even more important down the road (in my opinion) for web apps that have custom icons associated with them. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, full instructions for creating a custom desktop iPhone icon for a web page or web app are right here in Jonathan Stark’s excellent go-read-this-now book on building web apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/ch03.html#ch03_id35932602

The gist of which is essentially you are creating a 57 x 57 icon and then adding one of the two following HTML lines to identify it:

The first option inherits the glossy light effect and corner radius from the iPhone OS. The 2nd one does not, so you have to handle corner radius and any desired light effects manually. iPad icons use 72 x 72 pixel resolution. I’m not sure yet, but I’m betting the new OS will have something closer to the 72 px size. Anyone know the answer?

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iPhone and mouse events

Aug 1st, 08 / 0 Comments

PPK has written his impressions regarding his shiny brand-new Jesusphone. (I wonder did he get black or white?)

In his post, he tells us the initial reports for the behavior of mobile Safari with regards to things like documentation (missing), mouse event implications (game changing), and how the disjunct state of finger tapping and dragging compares with the continuous state of the traditional OS desktop mouse pointer. In particular, he points out the fact that the assumed ever-present mouse pointer (the little cock-eyed arrow which points black and to the upper left on Mac, and is white and points to the upper right on Windows) can no longer be counted on. And in fact, there is no icon any more. Your fingertip is it, my friend!

With the coming of the iPhone the mouse model has lost its inescapable logic. Mousemove, mouseover and mouseout (and even poor old :hover) have been downgraded to device-specific events that may not survive in the long run.

May not survive… hmmm, interesting impact. I think he could be right here.

But — and here lies the problem — these events are used in countless web sites and applications for a variety of purposes, and Apple simply cannot afford these sites not working on the iPhone.

Interestingly, so far Apple has found that it indeed can afford to dispense with Flash and Java on the iPhone platform, and while most complain that the checkbox isn’t complete, some argue that Apple is doing just fine and won’t be in any hurry anytime soon. Certainly demand for these babies has been extremely high so far. I would be interested to see how many of such sites absolutely depend on such functionality to work, and how many of those either change their site behaviors or create iPhone-friendly web presences as the demand for the mobile web increases. Wondering… but at the very least, things like these aforementioned mouse events – Flash, Java, and the like – are not yet queued up on Apple’s priority list, or else they chose to take the less-is-better approach. It is an interesting question: How much of the specifications do browser vendors adhere to on such a limited platform such as mobile devices? What is practical? What is feasible?

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Macworld ’08 Announcements

Jan 15th, 08 / 2 Comments

I think the MacBook Air is a beautiful piece of industrial design. Beautiful. I probably wouldn’t buy one, but I really admire it. I bet Yingwen would like it though. It is a sexy machine that is more about portability and fashion than functionality.

I know I am a power user at heart, and I’m always going to have my eye on the higher end systems that have long-term expansion capability, but I have to say that Apple did a good job on the specs given the space limitations. For one, the soldered RAM is set to 2 GB, so thanks for maxing it out. And 3 pounds for a full-size keyboard and screen is right there about the single most important reason I’d actually consider blowing upwards of two grand after tax and add-ons on such a machine. If I were still a hard-core BART commuter, this would make it a no-brainer.

Apple TV now looks cool now that it no longer requires a computer to connect to online services and they dropped the price, but the 24 hour limitation for rental downloads is too short. Yeah I know on-demand rentals from cable and satellite are about the same duration, and the iTunes downloads are a lot cheaper overall, but the current on-demand rental durations are too short anyway. Well, maybe it’s no big deal – I suppose the difference between paying $3.99 for a 24 hour rental and $12.99 for the full rights are pretty minimal in the long run. Ultimately I think the Apple TV features are pretty cool – especially with Flickr and Youtube connectivity. I was still hoping for an Apple TV that was actually a TV, and maybe with a built-in DVD player too. Less boxes and wires and stuff hanging off the back – something I could just stick on the wall. The only remaining complaint I have is that they still to this day have not implemented subtitles. Seems like a major failure on the part of accessibility here.

The iPhone updates were welcome. I think the most significant of these is the Maps app, where it now tries to triangulate your location. It actually works! Not perfectly accurate, but it seems to find me within the range of the circle that it renders. So much easier to now use “current location” as the starting point for generating driving directions.

I don’t get why they would charge $20 to iPod Touch users to get the software upgrade that gives them the same basic app suite as iPhone. Boo. Just give it to them already. Come on.

Time Capsule seems like a great idea, and certainly makes a lot of sense when used in conjunction with MacBook Air as a backup solution. This is a nice and convenient luxury item: If I had $500 bucks to burn, sure I’d go for a 1TB box. Otherwise I’d probably look for a decent tethered backup drive. UPDATE: Now that I look around and price these things, it isn’t that much more expensive than a standard off-the-shelf enclosed 1TB drive, and if you factor in the convenience of ubiquitous wireless backups, it is an attractive offer.

All in all it was a nice suite of announcements. Couple all that with last week’s Mac Pro/XServe items, and it is actually quite a lot of cool gadgetry. Apple TV seems the most significant to me at this point, and I hope they eventually make me my Apple HDTV already.

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Geekdom

Dec 13th, 07 / 2 Comments

Via Jase:

88% Geek

77%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

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Rebate

Sep 14th, 07 / 0 Comments

This is how all rebates should work. Confirm ownership over the web rather than cutting and pasting and mailing in a bunch of junk that would take six months to get denied.

Thanks for the store credit dudes.

Update: All may not be entirely well in rebate-land for some.

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