Over the past few months in-between endless bouts of client work and personal projects I’ve also started to try my hand the dark art that is iOS icon design. It’s something I’m hugely interested in but I’ve always doubted whether I had the pure Photoshop skill to be able to create anything on a par with the best.
While I certainly don’t think I’ve quite reached those heights yet, but I’m pretty pleased with the two icons I’ve come up with here. They’re not for any particular app, more just an experiment in lighting, texture and detailing. Sadly at normal iOS sizes a lot of this detail is lost, which is a shame, but I’ve really enjoyed creating them at the larger 512px size.
Hopefully I’ll get to create an actual icon for a published app soon!
Myself and my mate Marty love the way Reeder displays the screenshots of their excellent RSS reader app. So much so, we thought it’d make a great plugin for jQuery, using CSS3 Animations as it’s base. One of the goals for this mini hack day was to first build our own jQuery plugin, which neither of us had really done before, plus with the release of Firefox 5 we thought we could make the animations themselves work on a few more browsers, specifically FF5 and Opera (and any new ones that support CSS3 Animations in the future).
What we had at the end was version 0.1 of Lightly! It’s early days for this plugin, but we’re so happy with the results that we’re planning on a few updates to make it even better. Hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll add image preloading, captions, configurable box shadows (using CSS3 again) and a few other bits n bobs, fixes, etc. For a demo, just check out any of the project images on this site, as I’ve changed over from the great FancyBox to Lightly recently (gotta practice what you preach!).
If you like Lightly, and have used it on a site, or if you have any problems/suggestions, feel free to get in touch with us via our Twitter accounts; me and Marty.
UPDATE
Version 0.2 has been release, now with image preloading.
Recently I took part in an impromptu hack day organised by myself and 3 friends and held at my flat. Essentially we wanted to build something cool, in 24hrs. What we came up with was Chronogr.am, an little web app that uses Instagram’s real-time API.
So what does Chronogr.am do you ask? Basically, once you’re signed in to our app (a requirement of Instagram, we wish you could just see the stream without logging in, or needing an Instagram account) you’ll centre on your geographical location. As we’re quite new there may not be any shared photos in your local area, so simply pan around the world map to find some (here’s a tip as we all live in London, there should be plenty there!). The app updates every 5 seconds, so once there are a few people subscribed to it, images should start to appear in real-time quite frequently. Click on the little marker to see an image thumbnail, rollover the image to see the caption (if the user has added one) and then if you like the pic, click on it to see it much larger.
As you can see, it’s quite a simple app, but the excitement (for us anyway) of seeing the little pins drop down as new images are shared felt pretty cool and I think I can speak for all of my fellow ‘hackers’ that we are very proud of what we got out in just 24hrs. If the app becomes popular, we have plenty of improvements and new ideas to expand upon, so if you have Instagram and like the idea, please sign up and start sharing those photos!
One final note, the rest of the team that worked on Chronogr.am were: Marty Batten, Ryan Conway and Mike Jewell. All clever and talented chaps, so check out their Twitters.
