Internet Explorer web share is shrinking

Posted on May 10, 2010 by IdeaMonster

browsers
According to a recent survey by “Net Applications” this is the first time in 10 years when IE had less than 60% of market share. This is of course a good trend since this browser is obsolete, buggy and doesn’t follow the standards. Plus it’s hard to make cross-browser sites look the same and it’s usually IE’s fault. The fastest growing is actually Google Chrome which might in fact overpower firefox in a few years. That is all good news, even though microsoft is working on HTML5 supporting IE9, they’ll probably be at 50% in two years.

Apple – Adobe war has ended in a retreat

Posted on April 25, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Adobe announced a few days ago that they’ll discontinue supporting the iphone OS in flash and other products. Sure that was a battle they couldn’t win but in a way it’s pretty sad we’ll be limited to a closed platform. But maybe it’s good for the quality control, since a flash app is pretty easy to make so there would be millions of new “fart apps” and we have plenty of those already right?

So while it’s sad that adobe skips the iphone, I think it might be for the best here. Let’s just hope they won’t get mad and stop making the Creative Suite for the mac, because now that’d suck ;)

New photoshop functions to make designers obsolete?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Designers will loose their jobs?

Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?

No, not really

Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?

New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…

Pixelmator 1.5.1 released!

Posted on February 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

The guys from “Pixelmator team” are back! And after the long wait they present the next, 1.5.1 version of this supercool raster design software. This is a small update as it only fixes most bugs and adds some nice little features. But finally you can organize your brushes and the way this is done shows, that they don’t want to copy others, instead creating very usable workflows on their own. There’s also the announcement of the next, 1.6 version called Nucleus that they have started working on and that just adds to the overall excitement! Only three more functions (a proper text tool, layer styles and groups) and I’m dumping photoshop forever :)

You can check the software out (Mac only!) at pixelmator.com

Iphone music app development

Posted on February 7, 2010 by IdeaMonster

We’re starting to work on a little project for the iphone – a simple 5 octave keyboard with combining two synth patches playing at once + an optional drum pattern underneath. You can see the first version of the GUI here.

OmmWriter Equivalent for the PC ?

Posted on December 14, 2009 by IdeaMonster

I am a mac person. But at work I’m forced to reckon with the evil empire outburst known as microsoft windows. I discovered ommWriter and got hooked on how easy it is to silence all the shit from around and focus – think. At first I thought that experience cannot be duplicated for the bulky, ugly PC world. But I was wrong. Of course it’s not the same, but the differences let me have my sanity intact – the mac and pc worlds are different after all anyway. So here it is Ladies and Gents : DarkRoom
Of course it’s free, and reminds me a bit of the good ol’ days of hackers in 80’s movies and stuff like early DOS.
The cool thing is the simplicity, combined with a way to make the black screen transparent a little bit (while set to 98% opacity it has a nice “texture” from what’s behind but nothing’s really catching the eye)
The ugly green font is supposed to be retro, but we can change the font and background colors to anything we like. This time I think white text on a semi-transparent black background does it for me!.

Your mind is a wild monkey, so let’s write

Posted on December 8, 2009 by IdeaMonster

Sometimes revolution is in simplicity. And when my wild monkey brain gets wilder and more distracted, someone thinks of stuff like the OmmWriter
A beautiful, ambient writing app. Currently available as a free beta (for the Mac only). I got hooked. The main idea here is that it hides everything else, including the dock and navbar. All you can see is that beautiful image of a winter hill with a couple of trees. And well … text. This is all about text. Generating ideas without the blinking “new message” icons, and “you’ve got mail” icons, and many other distractions. As they say in the trailer on their website – you are alone in there, with your thoughts. And after a while the thoughts jump right through, ideas are generated, the work is flowing. Try it.