Author Archives: IdeaMonster

About IdeaMonster

Krop, Square Extension, Dust|box artist. Illusion of sense art group founder, creative director, open mind.

Wunderlist 2 is coming. Wunderkit development stopped.

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If you’re like me with millions of things “to do” and no time to do them, you’re probably using a task manager. Sure Apple has the “Reminders” app, but it doesn’t really work for stuff more complex than shopping lists. Two years ago a company called 6Wunderkinder introduced Wunderlist to the world. It’s a free task manager that had incredible growth during that time. Seriously, they have 3 million active users today. That IS something.

Then they decided to up the game and released Wunderkit – a collaboration platform based loosely on Wunderlist. The problem with it though is the fact that it’s 100% online and MUCH more complicated. Apparently users were wowed at first, but then rejected the app altogether and went back to Wunderlist. Which is exactly what I did (sorry guys).

Apparently they realized that they already had a hit product and it’s better to stick to improving on it, than to create the next big think, as it’s always tricky. In a recent blog post they explain why they’re coming back to WL and share their thoughts on Wunderkit’s failure.

What’s best about it is the fact that it’s gonna be native now, instead of being based on Titanium. That means that the 100% CPU usage bug on Macs will no longer be the issue. Also they’re planning frequent updates and new features! Awesome!

iPhone 5 it’s almost … retro?

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A while ago we talked about the fact that some recent UI design changes Apple made weren’t really that fortunate. When they replaced the iPod app with the “Music app” (which is actually a better name) they also went with an extremely UGLY icon that didn’t really match the rest. I mean come on, a dark and suspiciously thin note on an orange background just doesn’t do it for me. The Phone app, the messsages, the App store – they all have white icons on colorful backgrounds. This Music icon just doesn’t fit. At all. We’re not sure yet if it’ll be changed (but we seriously hope so) in iOS6, but it’s only a few more days to find out.

Right now take a look at that awesome retro-Mac icon set for the iPhone. Maybe Apple should go for that look? And we’d see Black&White pixel icons on Galaxy S4 ;)

Watch Motorola and Nokia September 5th presentations

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It’s funny how the keyword for 2012 is not a smartphone, but an ecosystem. Both companies announced new products and bragged about their ecosystems. But they’re right. Tech specs are not as important anymore as they used to be. The most important thing is what you can do with a phone. By the way we’re really liking both Win Phone 8 and the new Nokia Lumia!

You can see the Nokia and Microsoft presentation at:
http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/webcast/live/.

Why are designers afraid of big fonts? Web readability practices

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Back in the days when we had to design for 800×600 screen sizes, “The Fold” was somewhat as much feared as IE6’s ability to destroy layouts. Now it’s 2012 and we have 800×600 pixels and more in some mobile phones, and the web has settled for 960 pixel width layouts. But the Fold is still pretty strong in a lot of the designs.

On most websites a nice body copy font is considered to be somewhere close to 10-12 pixels, with the default leading. And usually to cover the fact that most web copy is just plain horrible, there’s a lot of graphics around the text, almost as if the main function (information) is loosing with the form (the graphics). It’s not readable. And I’m not talking about pink fonts on yellow backgrounds. I’m talking about most of the web.

It’s almost as if designers are afraid of making the content look legible. Maybe they’re thinking that if there’s more text than anything else in a design, they’re not really needed anymore? Who knows. The fact is that most of the web is terribly unreadable and actually painful to use.

And then came Flipboard with it’s pre formatting and changed some perspectives. Bigger fonts (between 16 and 24 pixels) came into play, and a leading of 1.4 em. Content consumption has become pleasant again. Apple added the “Reader” feature to Safari, and suddenly most websites are just a click away from being enjoyable!

Maybe it’s time to switch some perspectives and bring the web to it’s basic function (except porn) – reading stuff on the screen. And yes it can be a nice experience!

It’s almost there – Apple will unveil the iPhone 5 on September 12th

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Clever!

The rumors didn’t even need to be true, because we had common sense and it really WAS obvious that Apple will unveil a new iPhone this fall. It was also pretty obvious that it’s either gonna be called “the new iPhone” or iPhone 5 since iPhone 4SS sounds kinda stupid. So lo and behold here’s the date – september 12th 2012. A few more months till the end of the world to enjoy the new, supposedly 4inch device from Apple. And the nice “5-shaped” shadow is giving away the name. Cool.

I wonder how doomsday 2012 apps will look on that larger display ;) But on a serious note, we’re pretty excited what will the killer feature be now. Siri update we already know of, so I’m guessing a better camera system, especially after the Lumia 920 presentation yesterday. This is by far the most tech-geek exciting month in a while.

We bet this will look great on the new device:

Font of the week: Socialico

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Socialico is a problem solver of most layouts social bars

Socialico is a graphical font, that has two styles of popular social media websites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo. The styles are standard icon, and a negative enclosed inside a circle, so it’s pretty easy to incorporate them into any kind of design.

You can download the pack at: http://fontfabric.com/social-media-icons-pack/. It’s free but donations are more than welcome, so let’s support the nice people who give quality stuff away like that!

A 3d racing wipeout clone made with HTML5 + WebGL

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HTML5 is showing it's middle finger to Flash

It’s been a steady decline for Adobe Flash technology over the last few years. But in some scenarios it still stood pretty strong – one of them being games. Flash games exploded on the internet with many great titles (canabalt for example) and many not-so-great ones. When HTML5 took over web video as a better and more efficient player, games were still mostly a flash domain. Apparently that’s changing too, with Microsoft making HTML5 version of some Atari Classics and this WebGL wipeout clone that works extremely well in-browser on a 2011 11″ MacBook Air.

You’ll need a WebGL enabled browser (Google Chrome or Recent Firefox). Go to http://hexgl.bkcore.com to check it out!

In a few years Flash will probably cease to exist altogether if people can pull off things like that in HTML5 and WebGL. Good riddance!

Apple wins the trial against Samsung. Will that spawn innovation or kill it?

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Nothing spells copycat better than 1 billion dollars in damages

So the “tech trial of the century” is almost over. The jury has reached a verdict, Apple is happy, Samsung will appeal and life will go on. Or will it? Maybe this is actually a good thing, that it wasn’t the full 2.5 billion Apple wanted. It could still be a big dent in Samsung’s budget and it could lead to trouble putting out new devices. 1 billion seems fair and at the same time maybe it’ll be a lesson not to copy other peoples work so openly.

This result will certainly influence other companies to do things differently from now on, so Apple’s slogan Think Different can also be a jab at it’s competitors. Design differently! Android will have to lose the bounce-back scrolling feature and some others, as judged yesterday. Too bad people got used to these over the years, but clever people from Samsung and Google will find a way to replace them. Maybe that’s when we’ll see true innovation.

What’s funny here is the fact that previous Apple arch-rival Microsoft is now laughing, that Windows8 looks so good right now, as a truly original mobile OS.

Microsoft goes for a (semi) radical logo redesign

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Microsoft logo evolution 25 years
We might've been expecting that to happen, so meh...

It’s been long since MS redesigned their brand, but we’ve all seen it coming. Introducing the metro windows 8 interface with colorful tiles and nice typography, MS went ahead to further afirm the choice by changing it’s main brand logo to reflect that. Now it’s just 4 colorful tiles with Microsoft written in Segoe font next to them. While it might not be the most creative thing out there, it fits with the brand and the future chosen by the Redmond company. They kept the F and T connection in this one, which probably is supposed to suggest the evolution. Redesigns of big brands do happen quite often, as seen below.

And here’s a 4-step revolution from Apple:
Apple Logo Evolution

And one by Google:
Google logo evolution

Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are getting Unity Engine support!

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That might give the mobile Win8 a boost!

Windows Phone 7 (and ultimately 8) was a little late to the mobile OS party. Sure it brought some fresh new clothes, but other OS’es were already the buzz of the evening and it was hard to keep up. The system offered very little features (aside from great digitally minimal looks) and it’s app store equivalent was seriously lacking. Microsoft was either paying devs to add quality apps, or re-designing some classics themselves, but it wasn’t enough. What do people want the most from a mobile phone? According to both recent and not-so-recent studies (meaning: it’s been a widely accepted fact) it’s GAMES. Preferably cheap, console quality titles like Shadowgun (pictured above) from MadFingerGames.

Well now there’s a chance of more quality 3d titles coming to the platform, because it was just announed that both desktop and mobile installments of Win8 will have full Unity support. That means it’s gonna be MUCH easier for developers to port their 3d games to the platform, thus increasing it’s value.

That’s one more step towards more market share of Windows Phone (Which is still extremely low). GOod luck!

Apple vs Samsung trial ending – will it change anything?

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The birds are still chirping, the sun is shining, the air is as polluted as ever. So will Apple consume Samsung as seen above? Probably not.

The biggest tech trial in history is coming to an end as we speak. By reading the liveblog from the final statements I can honestly say that everyone’s trying super hard to prove a point and win those billions of dollars. Which is what would be expected. But what does this whole trial mean to the consumers?

Continue reading →

Font of the week: Qumpellka No12

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Font of the week: Qumpellka No 12

Each week we will look into our vast libraries and find the nicest and most useful fonts that are usually also free (or cheap). This week we have a nice oldschool style font called Qumpellka No12 by a Polish font designer Gluk. As you can see above it’s a nice poster font, but can also be useful for games, album art etc. It’s available on the OpenFontLicense and you can download it here.