Hello. I’m a 22 year old interface designer—from Gothenburg, Sweden—working at Spotify.
Jon Hicks just announced that his book “The Icon Handbook” is available for pre-order over at Five Simple Steps.
Jon Hicks, in the introduction:
Icons are little miracle workers. They circumvent language obstacles, give concise warnings and directions, convey our moods and show which buttons to press.
Judging by the free sample, it seems awesome.
Minicode lets you minify your CSS and Javascript files in a simple and fast way from your OS X Dashboard. Drop any CSS or JS file on Minicode and you’ll get a minified version saved to the same directory as the original file, with “.min” appended before the file extension.
Minicode uses the awesome YUI Compressor. As you drop a file in the dropzone, the shutter goes down, your file shrinks, the shutter goes up and your file is saved. It’s as easy as that — no setup, just drag and drop any file.
Minicode runs as a OS X Dashboard widget and joins Loremify as another free handy little tool for designers and developers.
If you have any feedback or ideas for improvement, ping me on twitter.
Minicode uses the YUI Compressor and thus requires Java. As of OS X 10.7, Java is no longer shipped with OS X, but it is very easy to install. If you try to minify a file without Java installed, Software Update will prompt you to install Java, and it will handle the setup for you.
Bjango in “PNG compression and iOS apps“ on their blog:
[…] if you’re spending any effort compressing or optimising your PNG images for iOS app development, you’re wasting your time.
And then later:
In an effort to dramatically increase drawing performance of iOS apps, Xcode re-compresses PNG files as it builds. It premultiplies the alpha channel and byte swaps the red, green and blue channels to be sequenced blue, green and red. The result is optimised for iOS’s purpose, but as a side effect, ImageOptim’s work gets undone […]
I use ImageOptim all the time (it’s a great app), but I had no idea it’s meaningless when working with iOS.
If you’re doing a lot of mockups, you’ve likely been looking for mouse cursors to demonstrate different interaction points. I have, at least, but have never been able to find pixel perfect PNGs.
Ergo, here are 33 cursors as separate layers straight from OS X Lion, in one PSD. Enjoy!
Paul Lamere in Building a Spotify App:
Developing a Spotify App is just like developing a modern HTML5 app. You have a rich toolkit: CSS, HTML and Javascript. You can use jQuery, you can use the many Javascript libraries. Your app can connect to 3rd party web services like The Echo Nest. The Spotify Apps supports just about everything your Chrome browser supports with some exceptions: no web audio, no video, no geolocation and no Flash (thank god).
In case you missed it, we launched a Preview version of Spotify last week with support for apps. If you’re interested in building your own app, be sure to read Paul’s article.
Anthony Tseng:
Anyone can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of rounded corners, but not everyone can explain where exactly that beauty comes from.
Good read over at UX Movement – Why Rounded Corners are Easier on the Eyes.