The Gallery has a couple of new illustrations. Balhaduin, pictured above, is a Photoshop painting over top of a sketch from one of my notebooks. I’ve used this technique before, but only on a few small scale illustrations. The original weighs in at about 2800 pixels square, and is by far the largest I’ve done in this manner.

The other illustration is a fun little character I drew for a slide in a friend’s ConvergeSouth presentation a few years ago. He was created in a totally different style, drawn entirely as vectors in Illustrator.

Balhaduin awaits.

A character drawn for a friend’s ConvergeSouth presentation.

But imagine if auto makers took this to an extreme, and put those controls at the ten o’clock and two o’clock position, where you hold the wheel, and actually mounted the buttons exactly under your fingers and hands — right on the surface of the steering wheel grip. Anytime you tried to turn the wheel you had to be extra careful that you didn’t change the radio station, or turn on the heater.

That’s what Apple has done with the tabs in Safari 4.

The title bar used to be a nice, clean expanse of chrome that served as an indicator as to which document or application was associated with a window, and served as a safe area to grab and move the window around your screen. Not so in the Safari 4 beta. Tabs have migrated northwards in the browser window, and made their home in the formerly pristine title bar.

Sure, you can still use the title bar to move the window, but it’s no longer a sure thing. The very fact that the tabs are there creates ambiguity. You’re clicking on the title bar and a tab — which part of the interface is going to respond to your click? Will my click select a tab? Move the window? Move a tab?

There’s also the matter of visual clutter. The title bar usually serves as a margin of sorts, to offset the contents of the window from any surrounding items. The tabs intrude on this, and lead to tragedies such as the mess seen in this screenshot from Adam Betts.

If you still think this is a good idea, imagine if other apps started doing this. Maybe Mail could migrate some items from the sidebar into the titlebar…

Or if preference panels started taking a cue from Safari …

Click images to enlarge

I’m sure that part of the reason Apple did this was to conserve space, and allow more room for web page content. But displays are getting larger all the time — my main display at the Iconfactory is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. I don’t think it’s necessary to squeeze each pixel until it screams for mercy.

John Gruber suggests we give the new tab and title bar layout a chance: “I’m willing to give the new-style tabs at least a week — don’t be a chicken and switch back already.” That’s fine. But you can get used to just about anything. Even if you find you can live with the new tabs, it doesn’t make them a good idea.

Jellyfish

I wrote this song after college and recorded it for a demo tape with the band I was in at the time, Faded Painters. Liz Eynon performs the vocals on it - she was the choir director at a church on the West Chester campus where my wife attended grad school. I play guitars and bass on the track, and Lee Morris is on drums.

Nothing Like the Sun

Recorded at a Faded Painters practice session, this song features Liz on vocals again, with me on acoustic guitar. However the song was actually written back in college - the lyrics are based on Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare. I performed it several times back then, mostly at open mic nights with my friend Todd Dengler.

One of my fondest memories from college is of playing this song with Todd at an open mic night on campus. We must have been playing especially well, because when we finished the room erupted into loud applause. It was by far one of the best audience responses I’ve ever seen at an open mic night - people are often paying more attention to their drink than to the performers.

This is also one of the rare times you’ll hear me sing - I’m doing backup vocals on the chorus.

As of Yet

From another practice session, again with Liz on vocals and me on acoustic guitar. Of all the lyrics I’ve written, these are probably my favorite.

:::

I hope to pick up my guitar again someday - it was definitely my longest-lived hobby, aside from icon making and web design (which is now more of a career than a hobby anyway). After all, I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with Garage Band some more.

I’ve posted a new desktop: Instrumental, a photo taken of one of the many instrument panels below-deck on the Battleship North Carolina.

The battleship sits on the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, NC where it’s been turned into a WWII memorial. I highly recommend touring it if you’re in the area - the tour is self-guided at your own pace and covers a large portion of the ship. A few additional photos may be found on my Flickr page.

Images are for use on your personal desktop only.

Download: Widescreen | Fullscreen

Last night I finally had some spare time to fix things, so iSource is now back online. Give it a web page URL and it’ll give you the source code for that page right in your browser. Handy for iPhone and iPod Touch users who don’t have the View Source functionality of a desktop browser at hand.

Enjoy!

“I’m impressed,” he IMed back.

“By the sheer number of variations we’ve produced?” I replied.

“Well, that too.”

It had taken over two and a half months and nearly 20 revisions to get to that final draft of the icon. That’s a lot of back and forth considering that we were the clients on this one and could do whatever we wanted without answering to any third parties. Coming up with the concept for your app icon is often the most gut wrenching and difficult part. In this case, we had the concept nailed down from the start - everyone was happy with the visual metaphor we’d come up with for version 1 of xScope, and we were just updating the look of the icon.

Application icon for version 1 of xScope

This time around it was the execution of the concept that made life difficult.

My initial forays into the redesign involved only minor changes. I made the icon black, and gave it a sleeker look by thinning the X spokes a bit. Wolfgang was a bit skeptical at first, having grown fond of the version 1 icon, but we all agreed this was a good direction in which to head.

He suggested tweaking the material to make it appear to be more of a carbon composite - a little less glossy, a little less pure black. I revised the icon accordingly, and over the next few versions, the new design began to grow on Wolfgang.

Unfortunately, at the same time Craig pointed out that in many cases the icon didn’t show up very well in the Dock. I went back to the drawing board and experimented with the lighting on the icon to try to get it to pop more. The top row of the image below highlights a few of the designs during this early stage.

xScope application icon redesign

Still, it wasn’t quite right. The first two icons in the second row above show where we went from there - increasing the screen size and reducing the width of the bezel. I hoped this would improve the icon’s presence in the dock, and I was also trying to get away from the CRT feel of the old icon. These versions were an improvement, but the icon still wasn’t popping off the dock enough.

By this point, we’d been going through variations for around two months. Getting a bit desperate, I threw out a few total departures, most notably the one with “running lights” going up and down the arms. Interesting from a brainstorming point of view, but definitely not a direction we wanted to head.

Finally, during one of these rounds of revisions, I got a promising look while editing the icon. Deleting some of the vector shapes left me with a metallic sheen that looked pretty cool. I re-did the icon in this style and sent it to Ged, calling it the “liquid metal” version.

Final drafts of the new xScope app icon. It’s liquid metal!

Thankfully, this version was a hit. It popped off the dock more and had a nice, modern and polished look to it. I lightened up the color of the screen a bit, made a few more tweaks, and after some finessing of the details by David we had our final icon.

xScope 2.0

The app icon is the first contact users have with an application - it should go without saying that it’s a pretty important piece of artwork. And considering the limited space you have to work with, even the small details can be significant. So, while the redesign of the xScope icon was a long - and at times painful - process, I’m glad we took the time to get it right. And I’m really hoping that everyone stays happy with this design for at least the next three or four xScope releases.