BlazBlue Calamity Trigger Icons

With the most recent update to CandyBar from Iconfactory, I was more than a little excited to import and export some new icons and since I'm a HUGE fan of a video game called BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, I thought I would try my hand at making some icons of the characters.....for FREE!!!

Click here to download (15.1 MB .zip, Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X)

The Language of Things

Quick Facts
Size: 208 pages (B&W photography)
5 Chapters:
    1) Language
    2) Design and its Archetypes
    3) Luxury
    4) Fashion
    5) Art
Where to buy: Amazon.com

Every now and again, I buy a book to try to understand the different forms of design and the mystique that draws me to it. My exploration led me to The Language of Things by Deyan Sudjic. To put it simply, it is one of the most comprehensible, intelligent, and clever books I’ve read in a long time. Here is why...

First, Sudjic has an non-American perspective which is refreshing and presents a style devoid of capitalistic or consumerist undertones. Sudjic’s statements are often quick and to the point and his citations from the works of prestigious designers and architects reinforce his perspectives. Sudjic analogizes consumerism to product pornography and device fetishism. Later, he cites John Berger’s Ways to Seeing to support his assessment. Berger states: “It is important...not to confuse publicity (of a product) with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the thing it advertises”. Sudjic identifies several attributes of design that seem to be overlooked or forgotten in modern products such as consistency (ex. black laptops paired with white power cords), redundancy, and a lack of durability. Sudjic states that “the allure of a product is created and sold on the basis of a look that doesn’t survive physical contact”. In addition, Sudjic states that the product cycle of each new version of a device is too quick to ever foster a meaningful and lasting owner/object relationship.

Second, Sudjic does a great job of transposing design into commonly available forms and communicates what design is not. According to Sudjic, a designer’s goal is to modify an existing archetype, such as a lamp or chair, which tells exactly what it does and what the user needs to make it work. In addition, Sudjic highlights playfulness as an archetype to encourage design as an engagement of all the users senses, not just the ‘look and feel’. Sudjic switches to define design within luxury as those products that represent stability, quality, scarcity, and communicate ‘coded social signals of privileges’. Sudjic identifies design in fashion by describing the processes, presentations (ex. shows, models, parties, etc.), and the use of uniforms to evoke an emotional response from viewers. I can say that Sudjic is absolutely correct because the websites of designers such as Nubbytwiglet.com, which I frequent often to stay inspired and interested in design and / or fashion, often are designed to evoke an emotional response via comments and praise in the artistry that appears there. When contrasting art and design, Sudjic believes that design is forever burdened with utility and problem solving, while art is driven by the intangible and can result in uselessness.

References to iconic designers and architects such as Earnest Elmo Colkins (Consumer Engineering), Philippe Starck, Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, Josef Hoffman, and Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime appear frequently throughout the text.

Final thought: Go get the book! I finished this in one day because I was enamored with it’s brevity and precise thoughts. Sudjic’s thoughts are clear and once you’ve completed this book, perhaps your thinking of what design is and isn’t will be clear too..

An audio interview with Deyan Sudjic as he discusses The Language of Things is available through The Sound of Young America. Click here to listen or download it (12.4 MB .mp3 format)

iPhone Cool Projects Review

Quick Facts: 240 pages
Source Code: 184.98 Kb (.zip file)
Where to buy: Buy from Amazon.com or eBook from Apress Buy eBook

iPhone Cool Projects is a very broad and deep iPhone development composition. The book is broken into 7 chapters:
CHAPTER 1 - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-StylePuzzleGame
CHAPTER 2 - Mike Ash’s Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
CHAPTER 3 - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
CHAPTER 4 - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design andImplementation
CHAPTER 5 - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
CHAPTER 6 - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
CHAPTER 7 - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

For new iPhone developers, Apress provides the source code for each chapter’s project to help those of us that like to learn by seeing the code work, and only then decomposing it into various pieces for learning purposes.

Without going into gross detail, I mainly bought the book to gain some insight into threading, multitouch interface design, audio streaming. Chapter 3 (Threading) opens by describing the taxonomy of threading and several keywords such as thread, process, multitasking, synchronization, deadlock, etc. After the description, the chapter walks you through the steps AND color graphics of each of the XCode screens. There are LOTS of diagrams to explain the setup and the arrangement of threads in the example project as well. In the past, when books have very intense globs of code, there is something lost when attempting to explain each line. iPhone Cool Projects actually does a decent job of walking through the connections to UIControl objects and completing tasks such as an event processing loop or implementing a critical section. Chapter 4 (Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation) explores many concepts and breaks mutilt-touch gesturing into 2 tasks:
- Arrange for touch messages to get routed to your code (Event handling: touchesBegan, touchesMoved, touchesEnded, touchCancelled)
- Understand the information passed to you (gesture recognition: tap, double-tap, finger scroll, swipe, pink/unpinch, two-finger scroll)
- Track and parse gestures from that information


Many of these sorts of topics are available via the Apple Developer Connection, but it helps to have additional context and perspectives on how to implement these types of methodologies for multiple situations and architectures.

If you are a skeptic and want to see more before committing to purchasing this book, Apress has generously provided a sample chapter (Chapter 5) to entice you to buy.

Try it out!

Why so few humanitarian iPhone apps?

It may not be obvious, but I’m an iPhone designer and developer. Although I got started late last year, you could say that I’ve been pretty successful at it, for the most part.

Recently I decided to do something I considered to be an act of selfless design: concept and build an iPhone application for a non-profit group that may benefit from exposure through 40,000,000+ iPhones and iPod touches. In June 2009, Apple stated there were 50,000+ iphone applications, so I figured “why not build one or more that might benefit humanity?”.

After contacting several groups, I found that several did not think that it was worth the time or effort to build an iPhone app for their cause...even if it was done free of charge!! Primary reason: “We don’t think an app might help us”.

Is awareness not enough? Can socializing ideals that a group promotes hurt them in some way? If so, why do so many have websites? Is it because there is a lack of understanding of how Apple's or Google's success could benefit non-profit organizations? Could it be because there is no incentive for designers or developers to volunteer to build humanitarian apps when the contract market rate is between $100-$200 an hour? Is it because no one believes that consumers are willing to be a part of a philanthropic effort when accounting for the cost of ownership of an iPhone or Google Android device?

Or is it something else altogether??

Please comment and let me know your thoughts on why there are so few humanitarian apps. Comment if you managed to find a humanitarian app in the iTunes App store or in the Google marketplace. If you even have a cause that you think is worthy of an iPhone app, let us know. Maybe the iPhone development community can get something built for them...

What can we / you do about it?