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 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.

Download Minicode (1 mb)

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.

[…] 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.

Ergo, here are 33 cursors as separate layers straight from OS X Lion, in one PSD. Enjoy!

Download Cursors.psd.zip (942kb)

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.

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.

Loremify?

Loremify is the fastest way to copy Lorem Ipsum. It lets you wrap in html, specify the amount of text, and copy it to your clipboard—all in one click. It runs as a Dashboard Widget in Mac OS X, and is completely free.

Download Loremify 1.4 (290kb)

New UI

OS X Lion introduced a dark gray Dashboard background, and since Loremify was also dark gray, it wasn’t the most exciting color match. Loremify is now brighter to contrast the background, and has a style more similar to Lion and iOS5.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can now control the entire widget through keyboard shortcuts. Press P, H or A to select Parapgraph, Header or Article respectively, type in the number of words or paragraphs you want, and press enter to copy.

Bug fixes

Loremify 1.3 wouldn’t copy anything to the clipboard for some users on OS X Lion. This should now be fixed.

Feedback

If you have questions, feedback or suggestions – ping me on twitter.

It’s a huge Spotify logo (and I mean huge), especially if you’re using a 2560 x 1600 px display. Here’s for all you Spotify users:

Download

• iPhone
• iPhone Retina
• iPad (1280 x 1280)
• 1280 x 800
• 1440 x 900
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1200
• 2560 x 1600

If you’ll be there, or just in San Francisco, give us a shout on twitter (Daniel, Joachim, me).