Panic’s Coda, our favorite code editor
Since 2010 we’ve been focussing more on designing and front end development. And although we haven’t been doing a lot of back end development we still find ourself using Coda almost daily.
We have tried alternatives like CSSEdit, Textmate and Espresso and they all worked nicely. There are however two features in Coda we think are pretttty, pretttttyy, prettyy nice that makes it a winner for us.
We released iconSweets DELUXE this week. As you might know we designed iconSweets1 and iconSweets2 earlier. Both are huge minimalist glyph icon sets available for free. The free icon sets both excisted of psd files that contained all the icons. We had taken note of some people’s preference to have the icons available as separate PNG files, Photoshop Custom Shapes (csh) and as a font. That’s why we released iconSweets DELUXE.
In our new portfolio you’ll find lots of scaled down UI elements. We chose to work with scaled down UI elements for various reasons. For instance; we think it allows us to let the visitor get drawn to that specific element e.g. when the original size is just too big to fit a small resolution screen. We wanted to share a couple of things we’ve learned through trial and error that could save you some time scaling down your own UI elements. In these cases we assume that you’ll be scaling your UI element down to about 50% of the original element in Photoshop.
Some time ago we received an email from Adam Smith from Advanced Photoshop, from the same guys who created Webdesigner Magazine that did an article on how to achieve a letter pressed effect like we have on iconSweets.com. This time we were asked for a spread dedicated to a studio profile on Yummygum.
Dutch designer Jonno Riekwel once tweeted a great tip for working in Photoshop regarding designing detailed UI elements. He pointed out the option to open one Photoshop document and displaying it in multiple separate windows. This means you can align multiple windows next to each other (or above/beneath one another for that matter).
A couple days ago we launched our brand new website. At first glance there might not be a huge difference compared to our old website. That is probably because we’ve worked really hard to maintain the clean and minimalist look we had going on before. Truth is, there are a lot of tiny things that have changed. In this post we want to give you some insights on what and why stuff have changed.
This blog post is based solely on frustration from working with iOS’ Auto-Correction. We’ve been been fans of iOS and it’s features since it first launched, however we’ve always found the Auto-Correction in it’s current state holding us back from being productive.
A superhandy action for Adobe Photoshop we’ve recently come across. Select the layers you wish to export (as a transparent PNG or JPG), use ⇧+F8 and you’re done.
Extremely sweet when exporting graphics for iOS apps. Get it at James Brocklehurst’s MightyMeta.co.uk and download it for free.
We rarely use OS X’s Terminal app, but we were recently forced to use it as we are working on a project that uses Ruby on Rails.
To make the experience a little prettier, we are now using Jeroen Seeger’s skin for Terminal. Download it here.
Since September 14th, 2011 we’ve been using Apple’s Trackpads at the office. When Apple first released the Trackpad we were slightly sceptic but with the launch of Lion a lot of situations emerged in which the Trackpad would come in handy. As you probably know, in OSX Lion a lot of things are inspired by iOS. This shows in the ‘new’ inverted scrolling, Launchpad and the auto-hiding scrollbars. All of these new features just have Trackpad written all over ‘em.
We’re both long time customers of the DutchING bank (previously Postbank) and in general we like all their services. However, one of their services always kept bugging us; their web app for internet banking. It hasn’t changed much in the past couple years and we were constantly irritated by the terrible user experience and the outdated design. We decided to work on a redesign and perhaps create some attention that they need to refresh. Not everything is fully finished, but let’s just say this is a much needed improvement already.
About a month ago our good friend Jeroen Seegers approached us with the cool idea to make our own Bowtie theme. We would do the design and he would do the programming. One month later we’ve made two variations on the same theme; a light theme called Mist and dark one called Dark Mist.
How often do you use OSX’ Color Panel? If the answer to that question is sometimes or frequently, you should definitely check out HEX Color Picker. Although OSX’s Color Panel lets you insert RGB, CMYK and HSB color codes, we all know deep down that copy pasting a HEX code works best.
We use HEX color codes all the time in CSS & Photoshop, so why not use them for choosing colors in the OSX Color Panel. Good for us Waffle Software must’ve thought the same thing. They created HEX Color Picker.
What we like most about HEX Color Picker is that it allows you to paste that one specific color you want while editing text or color styles in apps that only allow you to use OSX’ default Color Panel.
As you may know we’re huge Apple fanboys. It’s not just the hardware but also Apple’s OS and its enormous offer of beautiful designed apps that run on their machines. As business owners, we’re always on the look out for the best apps out there. And, as designers, we’re always looking for the most gorgeous apps out there as well.
We’ll start these series with Byword, the app we used for writing the initial versions of our blog. Byword is a writing app that’s intended to keep you focussed on writing, nothing more nothing less.
