Press materials for the SDK announcement.

In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced sans support for 3^rd party apps, which was quite a shock for us being – *ahem* – the 3^rd party.  But in March 2008 Apple pulled a complete 180, releasing the first SDK for iPhone with a super dev-friendly feature set that changed the playing field overnight.  To find our sea legs with the shiny new iPhone developer tools, we decided right then on our first internal iPhone project: a kick-ass clock with stylish graphical design and razor sharp user experience, called Night Stand.

The, erm... 'iconic' Night Stand icon.

The de facto iPhone standard for not only what a clock looks like, but how one functions, too.

Once unleashed, the dev team for Night Stand moved like a pack of badgers on home brew amphetamine.  Years of experience in user interface design and programming for OS X paid off bigtime with the transition to iPhone, and before the year was out Sourcebits had birthed its new iPhone-centric division: Spoonjuice, with its first app, Night Stand, cruising to number one in the Utilities category.  We had no idea at the time, but Night Stand would soon be downloaded over 3M times, receive heaps of critical acclaim in the press, and set the de facto standard for not only what a clock utility looks like on iPhone, but also how one functions.

The now-mandatory LCD clockface, a Night Stand original.

Pruning the interface like a bonsai tree.

Just how awesome is Night Stand?  If imitation is any indication, well, pretty frikkin awesome.  Starting with a bold, signature app icon and one gorgeously crafted timeface for v1.0, Night Stand set the motifs that continue to dominate even now among the over 200 clocks available today on the App Store.  Yup, you read that right: over 200.

But you don’t become Number 1 by luck.  You innovate.  And to do that you gather people with creativity and vision to drive the design.  For Night Stand, we put in place what soon became the Spoonjuice permanent core: a freakish assemblage of award-winning user interface geeks, icon alchemists, and over-caffeinated code zombies.  And with each wireframe came new iterations of the design, endless economizing of taps and swipes, pruning the interface like a bonsai tree down to its barest essence.

Metanoia

Classic LCD

Geek-friendly Binary, with beautiful, subtle animations.

Fierce self control.

From the beginning, Night Stand’s strong suit has been its simplicity: an extraordinarily beautiful clock, purposefully and lovingly designed, sans distraction.  Over time, with the introduction of several new clockfaces and increasingly rich feature set, it would have been easy to compromise on the interface.  But even now, approaching the landmark third version, nothing has changed on the surface.  You have to admire such fierce self control.  Especially considering what our competition has been regurgitating:

no comment.... ~_~

HD for everyone.

At the end of the day, despite the relentless stream of imitations, hyper-saturation of clock utilities in the App Store and swarm of crippled freebies from our rivals, Night Stand consistently reaches the Top 50 in the biggest markets while grabbing the #1 spot in at least 5 other stores internationally.  Daily.  And in our view, this is just the beginning.  With the next update for iPhone bringing in the high-end features of the best-selling HD version for iPad, everyone best buckle up.  We’re on track for another lightspeed jump ahead of the riffraff.

Beautiful, minimal Milk.

The new Night Stand world clock: peerless design and animation.

A new, unreleased theme... you'll have to see it to believe it. @_@

I updated my Violet Violence desktop picture to iPad format a couple days ago, and whilst digging through my stuff I found a few more pieces that I thought were worth sharing. Go on then, click this bunch of iPads hugging each other below to download. Nine wallpapers, twelve megabytes. Violet Violence itself is 5.2 MB, zoom.

I hope they don’t make your devices explode!

Take good care of your egg and before long you’ll be training up a scrappy little hatchling: Rocky-style.  Keep him healthy and happy as you navigate the challenges of his formative years, then – when the time is right – watch him explode into full bore bad-ass adult battle chicken.  Seriously.  This is a capital-f Fun game.

(l-r) Hatchling to Battle Veteran, plus Crab-apple and Bog Walker

Beast Farmer has a lot going for it, a real kitchen sink of an iPhone game: familiar 2D platforming, lush 3D character rendering, classic arcade fighting and über-cute digital pet care.

Swamp Chicken: Digital Pet for the iPhone Generation

2D Platforming

Swamp Chicken vs Bog Walker

To these, Sourcebits added a generous helping of peerless graphic and interactive design, expert engineering and quality assurance. Then, with all those pieces in place, Beast Farmer ferociously debuted across the App Store worldwide, devouring the competition while racing up the charts from Japan to Canada to the UK. Now 3 days into its launch, Beast Farmer ranks in the Top 5 games in no fewer than 30 countries’ App Stores, and is the No 1 game in 15 countries. Yup. Over 50,000 downloads in 2 days. That’s a lot of crazed, squawking swamp chickens.

When Industrial Brothers brought their Beast Farmer artwork and gameplay concepts to Sourcebits back in January they came in with a strong vision and sense of direction, the kinds of qualities that lead to a terrific development collaboration.  After initial consultations the contracts were inked, then engineers and project managers from both sides began hammering out the v1.0 feature set and timetable to take us from POC to a working alpha.  Then, after several months and round after round of internal beta testing and QA, the game was finally submitted and published on the App Store for an out of this world launch.

As with all our iPhone app development, whether games, utilities, or lifestyle-oriented, meeting with clients, getting to the core of their product, fleshing out their vision through expert engineering and pushing the technological limits of whichever platform we’re publishing for, fine tuning the interactive as well as graphical design, testing, more testing, reengineering, then testing some more, these things are what we do best, and what makes Sourcebits the go-to company for third-party app dev.  It’s been amazing working with Industrial Brothers so far and we can’t wait for you to see what’s coming next.  Stay tuned!

One Screenful at a Time, Please

One of our senior interface designers, Na Wong, fronts with strong shapes and bold, form-filling graphics.  Top and bottom nav bars frame the main window while inset vertical text on the left provides a subtle anchor for the dynamic content.  A muted background with soft noise draws the eye to the colorful featured work.

Another Sourcebits UI designer, Austria-based Philipp Antoni, takes the same strong centered rectangle tack but with multiple layers and vertical text navigation on the left.  As with Na’s design, featured graphical content leaps out from the main window set against a neutral background.

Lou Mantia’s site takes a stark, minimal approach along the same lines, with a massive centered rectangle on white and discrete text-based top nav.  Big, bright, saturated graphics instantly draw the eye, and note the logotype fill changing dynamically with the featured content.  A simple, yet awesomely creative touch.

Though not a designer’s page, the site for this year’s Iconfest (which we can’t wait for) takes a similarly minimal, rectangular route, with baby blue Bookman out front.

We also have Miles Ponson’s Californian Design, eschewing nav bars altogether and going with another recent UI meme: iPhone page indicators as clickable nav buttons.  And these – it must be said – do not port well to mouse-based interfaces.  If you’re using them for anything other than page indicators, please stop.  Now.

Also worth noting is Jonas Rask’s vertical rectangle, and on the non-rectangle front, we have another Sourcebits user interface designer, Edward Scherf, with speak-for-themselves 512×512 icons in distinctive bold shapes front and center.

David Lanham takes a gallery approach with a dusky, textured background and vibrant, almost glowing colors drawing the eye to four content-filled frames.

And finally, iconpaper.org features bold, black-framed squares on a 3×3 grid with bright, beautiful thumbs that simply leap from the page.  At the top of the grid you’ll find a minimal nav bar consisting of a few well-designed, glyph-like icons, and down at the bottom note the large, clearly purposed horizontal slider that keeps your eyes comfortably pinned to the single, gorgeous screenful of content.

Chunky

Chunking information into parcels of easily consumed content is nothing new, and at the ‘screenful’ level clearly works for showcasing a design portfolio.  But why stop there?  Anything that can be browsed is a candidate for chunking into screenfuls.  Online retail, text-heavy news and blog sites, rich media content – the top designers are already re-imagining the next generation of user experiences.

And Sourcebits has the best.  Yes, hands down, the best interface designers in the industry – several of them highlighted right here on this page.  Their passion for interface design is matched only by the laser guided Art direction of our own Apple Design Award winner Piotr Gajos.

Piotr and the design team, together with our squad of technophile engineers and programmers spend each and every day building stunning, intuitive interfaces for everyone from small app shops to Fortune 500 companies like GE and Coca Cola.  Check out some of our client pages below:

Companion site to Knocking Live Video, the best-selling app for iPhone and Android.

The Spoonjuice page, with dynamic top nav bar and main window content, incredibly intuitive and space-efficient.

Microsite for voice actor Kevin Doherty.  Hidden within the minimal interface are a custom mp3 player and smooth jQuery slide effects.

Drop us a line.  Let’s talk about the design of your next project.

It’s Social

One of the keys to mobile app success these days is enabling users to share content instantly via the social Web.  And surely that goes double for a mobile Web browser.

If we didn’t build Skyfire with one-touch access to your Twitter app of choice, Facebook Wall, IM service or email we would hardly consider it a finished application.

Lets You Explore

Skyfire fetches new media you’re going to love.  Say you’re scanning a bit about umbrella-wielding Britney, hit the Explore button and Skyfire sifts through YouTube, Twitter, Digg, and other sites for yet more text/video/pics of, yes, umbrella-wielding Britney. :S  It’s a handy way of letting users find more of what they’re interested in, and one more reason for them to set Skyfire as their default browser.

Killer Feature(s!!)

Now here are the crown jewels.  What’s the first thing everyone looks for in a Web browser?  Speed.  And Skyfire delivers – full throttle.  Hands down the fastest browser for Android, Skyfire renders pages far quicker than Android’s built-in browser or other third party apps, including just-released Opera Mini.  So yeah, it’s crazy fast, but our Android developers went the extra mile to ensure flawless 1:1 page rendering and scaling – complete with pinch to zoom, another first on Android!

But the feature that’s got everyone hot and bothered is Flash video.  Yup, thanks to some clever cloud-based wizardry, Skyfire is the first mobile browser to bring Flash video to Android.  Any time you land on a page with embedded Flash vid, a tiny popup will let you begin streaming it to your handset in gloriously rendered full screen.  And this is where the cloud comes in.  Skyfire doesn’t blast your handset with battery-choking, processor-crushing Flash video.  Instead, our servers instantly convert your Flash request to Web-friendly HTML5 video and beam the much lighter stream – 70% lighter! – back to your phone for smooth, desktop-like viewing pleasure.  And HTML5 video is not only easier on your battery than Flash, but also friendlier to your bandwidth consumption over the network.

So right there, we’ve got not one, but TWO Skyfire-exclusive killer features no other app can match.  And there’s more, but we don’t want to spoil it for you.  If you still haven’t tried Skyfire 2 on your Android handset, it’s awesome and free… so run along now.  Go get it!

Our own Brian Meehan returns from last week’s ThinkMobile 2010 in New York City to share his talk about Sourcebits’ recipe for App Store success.  With examples from our best-selling app for iPhone and Android, Knocking Live Video, Brian outlines 10 key ingredients of what he calls ‘WOW’ apps.

1.  A Killer Feature – i.e. the first cross-platform live phone to phone video feeds.

2.  Utilizes Core Functions – Make the most of what you’ve got. iPhone developers enjoy a unique feature set including Core Location, Accelerometer, and the most accurate multi-touch display on the market. Harness their power and reap the reward.

3.  No Proximity Limitations – At the heart of iPhone and iPod touch beats the most advanced wireless Internet device in the world. What separates a WOW fart app from a ‘Push button to fart’ app? Virtually pulling someone’s finger 6 time zones and 5000 km away. In Knocking Live Video we exploited the same basic premise: anywhere, anytime live video with friends and family.

4.  Intuitive Design – Users should never be more than 3 steps from any given action. A dedicated, talented user interface design team is essential.

5.  Social Viral Power – Will people want to show their friends? A WOW app generates social chatter, both on and offline.

6.  Social Tools to Catapult Your App – You may have a great app, but if it doesn’t offer instant access to Facebook or Twitter you’re handicapping it from out the gate.

7.  Sustainable Engagement – Whether sharing live video of baby with grandma and grandpa or enabling long distance shopping, a WOW app becomes a fixture in users’ lives.

8.  Works Cross-Platform – Don’t hobble your app by pegging it to one platform. Develop for multiple devices.

9.  Choose Wisely – Not only do we need to choose which platforms, handsets and carriers to optimize for, but which category to dominate in the App Store, Android Marketplace or BlackBerry App World. Muscling in on a popular category like ‘Games’ for example, will take more marketing oomph than lower lying fruit like ‘Lifestyle’ or ‘Education’.

10.  An Episodic Launch Plan – WOW apps don’t launch themselves. Coordinating blog and Tweet teams, PR releases with the relevant media outlets, on and offline event appearances, carrier promotion, etc all take careful planning. Launching without a plan is no plan for success.

Check out our streamlined new mobile page, live at http://m.sourcebits.com. 100% iPhone-optimized, rocks da house on Android and WebOS. Dig the barely there animations and intuitive touch-friendly UI controls. Sticking to a clean, less is more esthetic, all the key content of our main page is available but never more than a tap or two away. We spent a long time fine-tuning the entire experience, and along with Gmail and Flickr, we think it’s one of the top mobile Web experiences.

Duh.  ;D

All through 2009, our iPhone apps featured regularly in the top spots at the App Store with many being staff-picked by Apple. Our Mac lineup, too, enjoyed the same attention with regular staff picks on the downloads page at apple.com. Yes, it’s been an outstanding year, with – all told – around 5 million downloads, an expanded staff of 200(!!), and over 500 unique inquiries for our contract development services. And as we’ve grown, so too has interest in our back story from individuals and smaller dev houses, so I’m going to take the remainder of this post to talk about our arrival as one of the top contract dev companies in the world. Huzzah!

We founded Sourcebits in early 2006, just three of us, with a background in medicine and software design, and immediately set to work producing Mac software focusing on the niche we were most familiar with: healthcare services. At that time the Mac was gaining big traction among mainstream PC users, beginning to gobble up serious mindshare if not market share, and so we began the business of porting Win-based health-related apps to Mac, and soon after porting PowerPC apps to Intel as Apple began transitioning their chip architecture. We made decent trade doing this for most of the year, but as 2007 approached we started getting many inquiries for Web and application development, more so than the healthcare related stuff.

In particular, we started getting requests from game makers and hardware vendors to port their apps and drivers over from Windows, which turned out to be a crucial milestone. We spent several months working on a bunch of ports, and all this porting gave our dev teams a massive new skill set in all the associated technologies, so in a pretty short stretch our guys became fluent in a huge range of database, graphical and interface APIs that we’d never really planned for. And as the applications became increasingly complex we also began focusing on the UI side, hiring a team of heavyweight icon and interface designers. At the same time we were also investing heavily in Adobe-based RIA and came out with a bunch of cool cross-platform apps like GeeMail, which cnet.com reviewed as offering an even better solution than Google for offline mail browsing. All this expertise, along with further inroads into RIA and new art direction proved crucial as Apple revealed the iPhone in late October.

It didn’t start out roses, though. At the beginning, with no App Store and no SDK, we were limited to peddling Web apps with no real earning potential. Remember, this was announced during the Worldwide Developer’s Conference… and I remember developers actually booing Steve during this part of his presentation. But we plugged away and got really really good at making Web apps, like one of the first ever Web-based image editors, PixelPerfect, and Tangled Decals, which showcases a cool new online shopping experience. But 5 months later that was so much water under the bridge as Apple revealed the SDK and the App Store for the first time. And this was the moment of 2008. The SDK and the App Store blew us all away. We never imagined we’d have such flexibility and power to create for iPhone, not after the Web apps fiasco, and our instant reaction was: oh yes more please thank you!!

Everything we’d been working on the past two years, the driver porting, game porting, UI design, the contract work making original Mac and Web apps, all this combined to put us in a spectacular front-running position for iPhone development. And Sourcebits was thrilled to join the first round of Apple-certified iPhone developers in March 2008, snagging one of just 3000 initial licenses.

By September we’d published our first iPhone game, the Plateau, which was a huge critical and commercial hit, but this paled compared to our next app, Night Stand, which reached the Top 3 on the US App Store in November, and even now continues to be a steady earner. We pushed ourselves to push the tech, coming up with Fun Booth, the first face-tracking app for iPhone – the kind of app that has been copied literally dozens of times, and Knocking Live Video, the first ever video chat app for iPhone – a feat not even Apple has pulled off yet. And we expanded our contract development services for iPhone and increased our staff of engineers and designers to 200. With renewed capacity and the iPhone wind at our backs, before the year was out Sourcebits was designing original apps for everyone from small idea labs to Sling Media, to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric and Coca Cola.

In 2009, with Google, Palm and Blackberry releasing SDKs and App Stores of their own, we also began porting our more popular iPhone apps over to these platforms. And on Android we’re already a category leader with Night Stand and hands down the best Facebook app for the platform: AndroidBook. We’re going to replicate the kind of synergy that led to our success with iPhone, in terms of design sense, proficiencies in programming and APIs, and expertise in the broader technologies. So for now we’re not about short-term profit taking on Android or elsewhere. We’re taking the long view and getting our crew up to speed in all directions. So if you’re looking for some take-away from our success so far, it’s simple: be prepared.

The official Adobe press release states:

With support for the Android™ platform expected in 2010, AIR provides developers with a feature-rich environment for delivering rich applications outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems via mobile marketplaces and app stores.

What does the release mean to mobile developers? With the introduction of AIR on popular mobile devices, you have a killer development platform. Here are three of the reasons:

i. Write once, deploy anywhere
Developers would not have to worry about porting their apps for different devices.

ii. Reduced development time
Adobe Flash provides an IDE that enables the development of very rich UI and interactive apps in a short period of time.

iii. Better than Java for application development (on mobile devices)
Considering the resource usage and GUI library, Adobe AIR comes out as a better choice for app development on mobile devices.

Kevin Hoyt of Adobe demonstrates the Tweet Card app on Motorola Droid.

Though the iPhone OS may not officially support AIR, there’s a workaround to the issue – Packager for iPhone in the Adobe Flash CS5. The Packager for iPhone makes it possible to create native applications for the iPhone OS from Adobe Flash.

With the iPhone issue handled, and the AIR platform on all other mobile devices, Adobe Flash stands as a very strong candidate for commercial mobile development platform in the coming future. The new development will bring in a lot of talented artists and developers from the Flash side of the fence, and we should see a lot of exciting development on the mobile platform – starting with Android.

BANGALORE, India – December 22, 2009 – Sourcebits, one of the world’s top destinations for iPhone, Mac, Android and Web software development, today revealed a case study that outlines their approach to developing a highly successful photo sharing iPhone application, Knocking™ Live Pic Sharing, for Pointy Heads Software. The study explores the critical role that Sourcebits played in the development of Knocking Live Pic Sharing, an easy-to-use photo sharing tool where users can share extensive albums without long download times. Knocking Live Pic Sharing launched on the App Store in November 2009 and was listed in the Top 50 iPhone Apps just two days following its debut. In the first four weeks since the application launched, over 20,000 units of Knocking Live Pic Sharing were downloaded from the iPhone App Store.

Pointy Heads Software, an independent software development company that specializes in iPhone application development, sought to create a streamlined photo sharing application for the iPhone platform that could overcome the limitations of the current multimedia messaging service (MMS), which only allows users to send up to five photos at a time through a painstakingly slow sending process. Brian Meehan, co-founder of Pointy Heads Software, partnered with Sourcebits in August 2009 to develop a solution to solve this complex technical challenge.

By partnering with Sourcebits, Pointy Heads Software was able to launch the well-received Knocking Live Pic Sharing photo sharing iPhone application that successfully leverages a combination of wireless technologies, an innovative design and unparalleled user experience.

“The Sourcebits team not only presented us with a creative solution for surpassing the iPhone’s ‘five image’ barrier, they also delivered a world-class development experience that allowed us to continue to keep focused on the objective of the application throughout the development process,” said Brian Meehan, co-founder of Pointy Heads Software.

Knocking Live Pic Sharing is available for free on the App Store. To download the app, visit: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id335489277?mt=8

About Sourcebits

Sourcebits is a software development company with offices in Bangalore, India and Atlanta, USA. Established in April 2006 with just four developers, the company has grown to over two hundred developers and a talented crew of designers in just four years. Sourcebits has quickly become one of the world’s top destinations for iPhone, Mac, Android and Web software development. Headquartered in the Silicon Valley of India, Sourcebits is at the bleeding edge of emerging technologies. For more information, please visit www.sourcebits.com.

This post is an extract of message which I posted on Sourcebits’ internal Basecamp a while ago. It serves as our small library of wisdom, which each designer can access whenever they want and hopefully find answers to unknowns we stumble upon every once in a while. It has been helpful for us and we decided to share it with the world. Hoping that you don’t know some of the items and they will help you build better designs.

1. Apple Human Interface Guidelines

This is the number one resource for any designer – be it UI designer, web designer or even print designer. This document is a fantastic study on human behaviors when interacting with machines. Tons of VERY useful information. You should know it by heart!

2009-08-20 Version (Snow Leopard), Online
2006-10-03 Version (Tiger), PDF — This version contains UI metrics
1995 Version (OS 9), PDF (this one is quite funny, for reference)

2. Apple iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Same as above but focused on this small, ugly phone from Apple.

Go to website or Download PDF

3. Android User Interface Guidelines

This document can serve two purposes: 1) it can teach you how to make proper UIs for Android and 2) when compared against Apple’s documents, it can show many extremely interesting similarities and differences in both approaches.

Go to website

4. First Principles of Interaction Design

A webpage with very precious information about how to design interactivity: behaviors, actions, feedback, characteristics and Fitts’ Law.

Go to website

5. Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces

More about Fitts’ Law! This is an absolutely amazing thesis about human-machine interaction written by Matthias Müller-Prove from Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg. Pay attention to chapters 3 and 4. And learn Fitts’ Law by heart, it has huge implications in any kind of UI design.

Go to website

6. Information Design Patterns

Absolutely fantastic website about how to visually present various types of information. A must read!

Go to website

7. 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

Nice article on Smashing Magazine. A few useful tips on general UI design and web design.

Go to website

8. useit.com

This is a treasure. Tons of fantastic articles about usability. A gem! Teaches you what NOT to do when you’re designing.

Go to website

9. Eyetrack III

How does the human eye perceive information? A page about psychology of perception, cognition directions, colors et caetera. Helps you understand how to build more effective, sensible and easy-to-use designs.

Go to website

10. Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

• Minimize the number of text fields in your interfaces down to the absolute minimum necessary.
• Minimize the number of click/keystrokes/gestures necessary to accomplish actions in your interface.
• Make your interface as responsive as possible – minimize the latency of each and every action a user might take in your interface.

Go to website

11. Good design in ten commandments

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design helps a product to be understood

Go to website

12. What is usability?

Usability is defined by five quality components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Go to website

13. How people really use the iPhone?

We all love philosophy, theories, discussions, assumptions and decisions based on our expertise. So wrong! Lukas Mathis from ignorethecode stresses the importance of usability tests and I tend to agree. There’s nothing worse than a Mister I-Know-It-All Designer who claims that he’s got all user experience patterns in his small finger. In fact I think the more designer admits that he can make a mistake, the better he is. Consciousness of limits in this job is crucial because our work is used by millions of very different people. And it is absolutely impossible for a single person to objectify a design. Hence usability tests! Here is one quite interesting, it can serve as an example on how to perform such tests.

Go to website

This list keeps growing as I roam through the web and find knowledge which helps me understand what is user interface design and how to approach it. Expect this post to be updated and feel free to add resources which you find useful — let’s share the wealth!

Link to The Plateau: http://apps.facebook.com/theplateau

This is Piotr, art director at Sourcebits. I’d like to take this opportunity and talk a little bit about our design team. Why would I do that? Well, to be honest — there’s quite a lot to brag about!

My goal when I was completing the team was to find the best people from different environments. I was aiming to gather an eclectic, diverse and multicultural group of individuals. I have a strong belief that this method allows to create a very specific mix: dynamic, unique, able to approach problems from many angles and unpredictable (in terms of ideas of course!) And this is what I’m looking for in design: raw energy, unique ideas, dynamic and quick adjustment to ever-changing conditions and last but not least — fun.

Today I’m proud to be able to tell this — we have managed to do it. I believe we found some of the best designers out there. They come from various places on the planet. They have completely different cultural backgrounds, habits and native languages. And believe me, they are talented!

So here they are, the All-Stars team of Sourcebits (in alphabetical order so no one blames me for preferences!)

Philipp Antoni (Austria)

Phil is in his early twenties, yet he stands behind what most of you look at everyday probably: he designed interface elements and icons in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. Yes, this Microsoft. And not some obscure back-end stuff: widgets, toolbar and app icons. He is also an author of many fantastic themes, widgets, desktop pictures and themes. Not to mention his web design and coding skills. Oh, and he’s a typography geek.

He’s beginning the last year of his design school in Austria in September, which is something we’re very happy about — his theoretical background will be a great asset to our design skillset.

Benjamin George (India)

Our young icon artist and iPhone UI designer. He juggles pixels with ease and grace. Has no fear when dealing with piling requirements and is always positive. He’s the good little spirit of the team.

Gary Jacob Howe and Jon Plumb (UK)

This is our brand design micro-team. They have been mates forever and work together brilliantly. They initiate projects, recognize requirements, panic and run. But then we grab them, put back and they do magnificent job guiding clients through challenging projects, providing English-proper user interfaces and pretty visuals. They are versatile and come up with so much initiative that I have to stop them!

Kieran Mithani (UK)

Kieran is actually mates with Gary and Jon, but I’m listing him separately because of his main area of interest: movement. Kieran specializes in motion design: movies, animations, jingles and whatnot. He’s got an eye for dynamic narration, vibrant colours, twisty and concise plots. All of this makes him an invaluable addition to the team.

Sourav Sagar Panda (India)

Don’t be misguided with this rather playful last name. Sourav is a pro of all pros as far as 3D design is concerned. He has polygons for breakfast and breathes with shaders. His observation skill is uniquely sharp and his feel for harmonious colours makes him a very good painter too.

Raghavendra Shet (India)

Raghav is one of these guys: he comes to the office in Bangalore, sits down quietly and without questions produces solid user interfaces and then dresses them up in wonderful visuals. Independent, open-minded and very eager to learn. It’s a kind of person you need in your team if you want to remain sane. Oh, and also was the Gold Medalist in the 4th National Level All India Painting Competition in 2000!

Alexander Stremiakov (Belarus)

Our another European secret weapon. Alex lives in Belarus and is a heavy-weight interaction designer. And by heavy-weight I mean really serious. His excellent analytic skills, ability to squeeze the last problem out of an interface and sharp eye for logical defects make our projects sensible, organized and highly usable. His skills also make the whole development process easy to understand for both developers and the client.

Na Wong (Hong Kong)

Na (also known as Chun Kin) is a superhero: a Machine-Gun-Man who juggles projects with almost inhuman ease and provides unique solutions, valuable feedback and lots of fun. He’s one of the most experienced members on the team. He brings in a personalized mature style, which goes extremely well with everyone else’s tastes and attitude, which in turn makes him a key player in many situations. He is never late, he never fails. Giving him a task is like shooting a Patriot rocket: aim, shoot and forget.

Shemin Krishnan and Kiran Shastry (India)

This is our excellent 2-man-design-army. Shemin plays with 3D when he’s not busy fixing, slicing and adjusting visuals. Kiran is a true slicing Terminator, he makes his first steps in icon design and is extremely helpful in day-to-day interaction with developers. Both of them are silent, humble and undoubtedly — indispensable. Also, they usually complete their tasks ahead of deadlines. How cool is that!

I’m not sure if it’s entirely appropriate but I’ll say it for the sake of completeness of the impression: yours truly won an Apple Design Award in 2006 and happens to be completely obsessed with details, organization and unusual solutions. I was also gifted with quite good communication skills which allow me to steer this ship with efficiency, intensity, discipline and fun.

So there — I hope you enjoyed this insight in our All-Stars team. I am very excited to work with these fantastic (and fanatic!) people and am confident that we will achieve truly outstanding things.

Now we’ll go back and have more fun with pixels, if you don’t mind.

The Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, a product of a group of 47 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience and this not only signals the coming of age of collaborative ventures by a world looking beyond proprietary Operating systems, but also gives a new meaning to Software portability.

Google Android platform is poised to make inroads in all walks of your life. The vision is clear – From SmartPhones, to NetBooks, to Desktops. It is just a matter of time before the invasion is complete.

Applications built with the Android SDK, can work on flavors of Linux, Windows and the Mac OS, bringing a vast resource pool of talent, to put their minds together for improving the quality of life through better applications in business and wholesome entertainment.

Come join us in this endeavour to share knowledge, and get solutions to the most vexing problems you face; Be on the Next Gen ‘bleeding edge’ of technology. Visit the latest Android Development Blog from Sourcebits now.

I’m proud to announce that our flagship iPhone application Night Stand was reviewed by the biggest online Mac magazine — Macworld. Rob de la Cretaz gave our baby 4 of 5 stars! Have a look at the excerpt of the review:

“Something I really love about new technology is the possibility that it’s so revolutionary, it replaces things that have been commonplace in our lives for a long time. The iPhone is no exception to this, as it has found a way to take over the roles of all sorts of things we hold near and dear. Thanks to Night Stand, you can add digital alarm clock to that list.”

To read more, head over to Macworld website.

Thanks to Macworld for such a nice review and as always — big thanks to all of our users for splendid feedback and ongoing support. You rule!

To celebrate the release of new Sourcebits website, I have decided to prepare a few goodies for you. This week I present you with Violet Violence a desktop picture with organic waves motif from our Nerve Store website design.

Click the preview to download:

This desktop picture comes in PNG format (3,6 MB), 2560 x 1600 resolution. Feel free to resize/crop it for personal use.

This is my first post here, so let me introduce myself — I am Piotr, the new art director at Sourcebits. My job is to make sure that pixels ordered by you look lovely and make sense

I’d like to share a few things I discovered about Photoshop CS4. It’s a result of research driven by madness, irritation and disappointment.

Getting crashes?

I found out that major culprit in Photoshop CS4 is flaky OpenGL support. They didn’t get it right, what is more: it looks like they shipped a product which hardly supports OpenGL. If you look at Adobe support documents, 95% of solutions for common problems state one thing: disable OpenGL. Remaining 5% of solutions say: update your graphic card drivers. How do I do that on a Mac? Oh, I forgot — you can’t, there is no notion of ‘drivers’ in OS X. Neat. My Photoshop was crashing like crazy so I decided to give disabling OpenGL a go.

Simply go to Photoshop Preferences > Performance and uncheck Enable OpenGL Drawing checkbox. Restart, spend some time working and see if it makes any difference. It did for me!

There is a drawback to this method. You will lose all OpenGL-related features like:

• Color matching across displays: it doesn’t work correctly anyway.
• Canvas rotation tool: it’s buggy as hell, blurs images when used. Useless! It’s difficult not to mention that Corel Painter has had this feature for years and it works flawlessly.
• Pixel grid: it’s pointless since you can set regular grid to 1 by 1 px. Plus, it’s buggy: in some situations selection marquee and guides don’t match with gridlines. Ugh!
• Smooth zoom: just eyecandy. Nothing critical in daily use. And can be irritating.

More crashes?

There is one persistent crash that happens even if you disable OpenGL. When working on a complex project (many vector layers, layer groups and layer effects) and you use Layer > Duplicate Group… command, or actually: any function related to layer duplicating. After using it 3 or 4 times, Photoshop explodes.

Nice.

How to make life bearable with this flaw then? Enter EverSave: a very neat Mac application which adds auto-save functionality to any application in your system!

Check out this baby!

It’s free and it really works! I have set mine to save automatically every 2 minutes and Itve been much more relaxed about my work since then.

I hope this stuff helps. If you have any other problems with CS4 apps, ask here: I might be able to help you out.

And if you want to find out a bit more why and how Adobe is a bunch of amateurs, check out this blog

GeeMail is developed for the AIR runtime using the PureMVC ActionScript 3.0 framework.

Live Quotes is a feature-rich tool for those interested in the stock market. Live Quotes features an intuitive user interface for adding stock symbols of your interest and displaying the relevant stock data associated with them.

 It can track stock data second by second, compare data between any two given dates; which can be represented in five different chart types to help you in data analysis and price comparison.

Live Quotes is an AIR application developed using the PureMVC ActionScript 3.0 framework.

And the icing on the cake is, the article made it to the Digg Front Page, a first for our brand SpoonJuice.

A few excerpts from the review:

“What I found so intoxicating about the Plateau was that the reward was just playing the game. “

“The Plateau is achingly beautiful.”

“Yes, I’m gushing over the Plateau, but I cannot help it.”

Check the review here: The Plateau Review by ign.com

Mac Games Arcade 1.0 is now shipping! Nearly 400 digital download Mac games are now available at your fingertips. In celebration of the release, Mac Games Arcade is offering 5 free games. One free game will be made available each day for the next 5 days.

Friday: Pangea Arcade – coupon code: freegame1 (expires Saturday)
Saturday: Bullet Candy – coupon coming Saturday
Sunday: Rocket Bowl – coupon coming Sunday
Monday: Platypus – coupon coming Monday
Tuesday: Nanny Mania – coupon coming Tuesday

The Plateau is a non-area, a corridor between worlds.
Immerse yourself in the mind-bending space challenge. Unravel holographic structures of orbs connected with glowing lines to find your way through unknown origins of the outer space.

Features:
Choose heads or bodies from your existing photos or the photos we provide
Add new heads or bodies using your iPhone’s camera
Choose from several BobbleHead sounds
Save your BobbleHead to your photo library

You can find more info about the application here

Change list includes:
1. Complete apple script support to automate your dmg production without ever touching the graphics interface

2. Support for grid functionality to completely control the objects within DMG container

3. Exciting new DMG templates

4. Numerous bug fixes and overall interface improvement.

What is great about DMG Architect:

Easily add your own custom window backgrounds, files and icons.

Total WYSIWYG control of everything including background image and window location.

Use any image for your container icon, not just ,ICNS files. Even change the icon of files already added to a project.

No artwork > No Problem. Choose a theme from our gallery of backdrops and icons.

Add and update text without editing your background images.

Add encryption for extra protection.

Putting legal notices for your software is simple.

Burn your project directly to CD or DVD.

Release your project as a tamper-proof disk image.

A full demo is available at Sourcebits’s website. DMG Architect is priced at $29.99 and is available from Sourcebits site.

‘Google Chrome’ is a new web browser from Google which is open source and based on open source ‘Web-Kit’ rendering engine. Google Chrome is focused on today’s web-development which is service based, it translates into most of web pages act like web applications rather than simple web pages.

Google Chrome is blend of best features present in other browsers as well new ones. it also introduces some recognizable GUI changes. Screen shots of Google chrome can be found here. Google has also published a comic book on this baby. This is beta download link as specified by Google (its different issue its not working for me).

I’ll be digging further into other features of Google Chrome but for now have glimpse of few features of it. Chrome has ‘Speed Dial’ as in Opera and in Firefox with help of some plug in. Tabs will be located at top of window, not bellow address-bar, they call it natural flow, tabs can be moved from one window to another without changing the states. Address-bar incorporates search sugests, history and bookmark search as well.

Google Chrome provide seamless integration with GoogleDocs and probably other Google services.
Most charming feature i found is if any web-app crashes inside browser it’ll not affect browser and browser will not close. Google Chrome employs multithreding and better memory management and sums up with ‘Task Manager’ so user can see which website or browser component (e.g. Plug-in) is using how much memory.

Since JavaScript is so much important to work for today’s web applications, Google Chrome also ships “JavaScript Virtual Machine V8”.

Anyways Firefox 3 is not up to mark for me if compare with hype it collected, me too pledged for download day of Mozilla but its most unstable version i have ever seen. I believe only Google can help us to get rid of bad dreams of various avatars of IE.

The service behaves like a regional Twitter, but is geared towards sharing information rather than chatting – it’s sort of like a neighborhood bulletin board in the cloud. Instead of using a follow system, nrme makes all messages public to users within a 9 block radius (users can still private message each other if they’d like).

Thank you Smashing Mazagine

As per research the most memorable domain names on the net are the ones that are combination of meaningful words like Facebook (Face + Book), Basecamp (Base+Camp), Campfire (Camp+Fire), iPhone (i + Phone), etc..

MilkyDomain lets you find exactly these kind of domains, that are combination of meaningful words and are easy to remember.

Give it a try

Looking forward to making the Best Games / Applications on iPhone / iPod Touch.

We hope you will enjoy this site.

This exceptionally brilliant ‘feature’ may have nothing to do with me as a web developer, but the UI retardation was too much for me to resist making a remark on it.

In case you are wondering why I am using IE7, I just happened to be performing a cross-browser check (thanks to IE series) of a webpage when I was blessed with the heavenly experience of this advanced technological feature.

Change list includes:

• Complete apple script support to automate your dmg production without ever touching the graphics interface

• Support for grid functionality to completely control the objects within DMG container

• Exciting new DMG templates

• Numerous bug fixes and overall interface improvement.

What is great about DMG Architect:

• Easily add your own custom window backgrounds, files and icons.

• Total WYSIWYG control of everything including background image and window location.

• Use any image for your container icon, not just ,ICNS files. Even change the icon of files already added to a project.

• No artwork > No Problem. Choose a theme from our gallery of backdrops and icons.

• Add and update text without editing your background images.

• Add encryption for extra protection.

• Putting legal notices for your software is simple.

• Burn your project directly to CD or DVD.

• Release your project as a tamper-proof disk image.

A full demo is available at Sourcebits’s website. DMG Architect is priced at $29.99 and is available from Sourcebits site.

You can use the application on your iPhone using this URL

http://www.iclueless.com

More details about the product can be found here http://www.macxware.com/site/products/LDSPro/overview.html

A sample portfolio of the logos deisgned using this application can be viewed here
http://www.macxware.com/site/products/LDSPro/logosamples.html

Solution: Contain the input field in a relatively positioned div and absolute position the input field.

Rejoice!

This function will taken in a JSON string and return you a valid JavaScript object – without using eval(). Enjoy!

		function safeObject(s) {
			var o = new Object();
			var a0 = s.split(’,’);
			var al = a0.length-1;
			$.each(a0, function(i) {
				// First item
				if (i == 0) {
					var sl = this.length-1;
					var nv = this.substr(1, sl);
				}
				// Last item
				else if (i = al) {
					var sl = this.length-1;
					var nv = this.substr(0, sl);
				}
				// Mid items
				else { var nv = this; }
				nv = nv.replace(’ ‘, ‘’);
				var nvs = nv.split(’:’);
				o[nvs[0]] = nvs[1];
			});
			return o;
		}

John Resig might want to include this in the next release of jQuery.

1. How do I remove all the children from a DisplayObject (MovieClip etc)?

while (my_mc.numChildren) {
my_mc.removeChildAt(0);
}

2. How do I instantiate a class dynamicall?

import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

var cs:String = ‘Part_’+i;
var DynamicClass:Class = flash.utils.getDefinitionByName(cs) as Class;
var tc:* = new DynamicClass();

3. How do I create a mirror image of a MovieClip?

my_mc.scaleX = -1; // mirror image
my_mc.scaleX = 1; // back to normal

I had a good time breaking my head over jQuery rendering bugs in Safari. Somehow I managed to find the fixes for the bugs I encountered. I hope this post will come handy to those who WILL come across the bugs. The fault is Safari’s.

Bug 1: Objects blink out when doing a fadeIn (basically a call to the animate function with opacity property) animation.
Bug 2: Objects dislocate when doing a fadeIn animation.

For bug no.1, when you select the empty space left by the object that disappeared, the object reappears most of them time. That hints, some axial action needs to be done on the object to make it reappear or prevent it from disappearing.

This is how we do it:

$(’#foo’).fadeIn(‘slow’, function() {
$(’#foo’).css(‘position’, ‘relative’).css(‘left’, 0).css(‘top’, 0);
});

We force a position property on it for an axial action with no real effect (left:0, top:0).

Bug no.2 gave me no hints as how I might fix it. But applying the same fix solved it.

I remember telling someone to try that fix for an unrelated bug resulting at the end of a jQuery animation. Don’t remember the details but looks like it fixed that too.

Universal fix for Safari jQuery bugs?

Besides this we will also post news about all the exciting products that we are developing in Soucebits and keep you updated.

So stay tuned ! and expect good things from us…