There’s no denying that Apple’s success with iOS has influenced every aspect of their business, but it goes even further than you might think: Apple’s now even modeling its packaging after iOS app icons!
One of the things I miss most about the design of the iPhone 4S is the ability to easily change the back of my iPhone to something different, like a non-standard color, or even teak.
You simply can’t do that with the iPhone 5, but Gizmodo just pointed out an even better idea: you can laser engrave the back of your iPhone 5 with your own custom design.
This is awesome, and there’s a laser engraving place right around the corner. I might just have to give it a try. The only questions are, which design should I get, and is this going to void my AppleCare+? After all, technically, it’s just a bunch of scratches.
There’s more laser-engraved iPhones at the link below, so check them out.
Source: Gizmodo
Kyle Buckner has been inspired by Steve Jobs his whole life, ultimately choosing a career in design due to the Apple founder’s influence.
Today, he announced a new tribute piece in honor of the first anniversary of Jobs’ passing: a specially designed desk, available in two colors from his website. The desks are a labor of love from Buckner that include a special Steve Jobs logo, designed specifically for this project. The result is a piece of furniture that’s both functional and beautiful, much like the product designs Buckner’s hero was a lifelong advocate for.
The desks are selling fro $999.99 apiece, with a portion of the proceeds going to The American Cancer Society. We took a few minutes to chat with Buckner via email.
Steve Jobs has changed the world four times, by my reckoning. One year after his death, is the world different? What is his legacy? Is it the company that he started, journeyed outward from in disgrace, and ultimately returned to in triumph? How about the devices he had an enthusiastic hand in bringing to market? The business of music and film? What is the world now that it would not have been without Steve Jobs?
It’s all of those things, of course. Jobs’ legacy is not something we can distill into a simple slogan or tagline. Steve Jobs worked for a world in which the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer electronics enhances our lives in a very human way.
Let me explain.
There’s a common misconception about jailbreaking. Many believe that people jailbreak just to pirate apps. While many do undoubtedly jailbreak for the sole purchase of stealing, the reason jailbreaking exists is definitely not piracy.
At its heart, jailbreaking is about staying ahead of the curve. In this case, the curve is Apple itself. Innovation is key. Jailbreak developers create hacks, tweaks, and extensions for iOS that go beyond the boundaries of what Apple allows. Jailbreaking exists for the same reason Apple exists: to challenge the status quo.
The world’s first jailbreak convention, JailbreakCon, is happening this weekend in San Francisco, and Cult of Mac will be there reporting from the show floor. We sat down with a couple jailbreak designers who will be attending JailbreakCon to get their thoughts on jailbreak innovation, good design, and why iOS is the best mobile platform on earth.
Hate skeuomorphism? Hate the way Apple’s slathering all of its apps with faux dead cow skin? Tough luck, because you know whose idea it was? Steve Jobs himself.
Let me paint a scenario for you. You’re a creative type. Maybe professionally or as a hobby or maybe you’re just the go-to person in the office. You need to pull a rabbit out of your hat—again— and you’ve got nuthin‘. Like less than nuthin’. What you need are some creative resources to browse through and use for your project.
Most of us have a few things stashed away to use, but those get old and stale fast. Which is why from time to time you need to pick up some new fonts, textures, graphics, icons, and such. Something like The Creative Design Bundle 2.0.
Let’s say you want to program, oh, everything. Websites, responsive-design websites, iOS games, and iOS apps. Then let’s through in, just for kicks and giggles, Ruby and PS6. Cool?
This is hours and hours of classes. If you take classes the “traditional” way in a classroom, getting through all this will take a while. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for in-person classes (I teach them myself), but I’m also a big fan of self-paced, online courses that let you learn at your pace and on your own terms/time.
This is why I like these bundle deals for courses. Like the Programming Bootcamp we kick off today.
Why limit yourself to one designer when you can tap into the talent of HUNDREDS? Competition breads excellence which is exactly what this deal will bring to your needed designs. The idea behind 99designs is to essentially have designers compete for your business. Awesome right!?
Dolphin is one of the best third-party browsers you’ll find on iOS, and it just got even better on the iPhone, thanks to a new design and user interface, new features, and lots of improvements in version 6.0.
The old one lasted a quarter of a century, but Microsoft has now unveiled a new logo ahead of the anticipated launch of Windows 8, the most radical revision of the world’s most popular desktop operating system to date. It’s boring, but in regards to embracing the minimalism of today’s design trends with a soft, non-stylized font, it does a good job.
At this point, most of our readers are familiar with what the next iPhone is going to look like, including the fact that it will feature a unibody design with a two-tone metal backplate. But what’s the story with that metal backplate? Has it been designed that way just to look good and set itself apart from the design of the iPhone 4/4S, or is there a more cogent design philosophy behind the three alternating stripes of metal and glass?
We won’t know for sure what Apple is thinking until the iPhone 5 is officially announced, but one industrial designer has a great theory about why the back of the next iPhone looks the way it does. As is usually the case with Apple’s design, the new iPhone’s back plate doesn’t just look good… it’s incredibly functional and magnificently strong.
It seems that making your latest product look exactly like the market leader isn’t always the fastest route to success. As Samsung found when it aired its first commercial for the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the device is so similar to the iPad that half of TV viewers thought it was an Apple product. Only 16% realized it was made by Samsung.
More juicy tidbits keep surfacing in the Apple vs. Samsung patent trial. We’ve already seen dozens and dozens of early iPhone and iPad prototypes, and we all learned that Apple literally designs products around a kitchen table. A new finding reveals that Apple had “strong interest” in curved glass for the original iPhone, but the idea was shelved because it would have costed too much to make at the time.
In the first day of actual testimony today, US District Court got to hear from the first expert witness, Christopher Stringer, a long-time Apple designer who worked on the original iPhone designs. His testimony described Apple’s design team as a group of 16 “maniacal individuals” who spent a lot of their time around a kitchen table, brainstorming new products.
Stringer wore an off-white suite and narrow black tie to testify, an outfit to complement his long hair and salt-and-pepper beard. He told the jury, “Our role is to imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life.”
The process they use is unique, and includes a kitchen table.
Apple is one of the world’s only companies that isn’t content to push out a great product with a few flaws. They want everything to be perfect. It’s one of their biggest strengths, but it also prevents a lot of neat products and ideas from reaching production. It turns out that the iPhone was no different during its inception, and even after all the cool prototyping and public demand for a great smartphone, Apple nearly axed the iPhone before it was launched.
Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, stated in a recent interview that small design flaws with the iPhone nearly caused it to get shelved, because even though the iPhone was good, it wasn’t excellent until they figured out how to fix some fundamental problems, like the proximity sensor.
Don’t you just love iCloud and how it seamlessly keeps all of your information synced up, making you feel all warm and light and free? Don’t you just want to marry it, or maybe live inside a nice fluffy iCloud synced world? Maybe not. But now you can, if you move to Melbourne, Australia and buy this gorgeous house that’s shaped like the iCloud logo.
Do you see it? How the structure makes an iCloud shadow there on the pool? Ok, we put that there to help you visiualize it, but seriously, this house looks almost exactly like the iCloud logo, and it’s just as crazy on the inside as the outside.
Like a healthy baby in utero with all its fingers and toes showing on the ultrasound, we’ve now got a pretty good picture of what the next iPhone will look like: longer, thinner, a new metallic back, a smaller 19 pin dock connector and, of course, a bigger 4-inch display.
It’s going to be a beautiful phone, but what next? It’s unlikely that Apple will do another major iPhone revision for awhile, which means future iPhones will, for the forseeable future, probably just refine the forthcoming design.
Here’s a beautiful concept of what the iPhone’s design could look like in the next couple of years, courtesy of French designer Nak.
One of the many pros of jailbreaking is the ability to theme your iOS device. When you install a custom theme in Cydia, you’re effectively replacing Apple’s default iOS design with something new and fresh. There are many great themes for jailbreakers, but my new favorite is undoubtedly ayecon. Developed originally for the iPhone and iPod touch, ayecon is coming to the iPad on August 3rd.
I’ve been using ayecon on my jailbroken iPad for a couple weeks now, and I couldn’t be happier. Here are some screenshots to give you a taste of what to expect from this benchmark iOS theme:
Or not. In an exhaustive (and for him, probably exhausting) 2,700-word article, Chris Suave has compared the icons of many apps that have moved from OS X to iOS (and sometimes back again). The results show that Apple is one of the worst and laziest offenders in the game.
This is the Sandberg Battery Case for iPhone 4. Designed in Italy, it’s a low-cost backup power supply and case with svelte good looks. It provides a good balance between size and power storage, but isn’t without some flaws. Overall, it’s a good deal but let down by what look like lapses in manufacturing quality control.
Want to quickly check the weather on your iPhone? Want to have your eyes soothed by wonderful, minimal design at the same time as you’re informed of the temperature outside? Then you need WTHR, an iPhone app which could have been designed by Dieter Rams himself.
When I first spotted those leaked images of what was claimed to be the next-generation iPhone’s rear panel, I wasn’t keen on the two-tone aluminum look, and I found myself wondering what Jony Ive was up to inside Apple’s design labs. But now that I’ve seen a few mockups of that design, I’ve changed my mind.
In fact, the latest mockups, created by Martin Hajek, look absolutely incredible.
Apple must have a hard time thinking of ways in which it can improve the design of the iPhone; after all, it already looks pretty terrific. But this concept design for a transparent device is by far the most beautiful iPhone we’ve ever seen. In fact, it pains me to realize we’ll never see an iPhone like this.
Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, swapped sunny Cupertino for London today to receive his knighthood from Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. The 45-year-old Brit, who is responsible for the iconic designs behind Apple’s computers and iOS devices, said he is “both humbled and sincerely grateful” for the “absolutely thrilling honor.”
While in the capital, Ive also gave what is likely his most revealing interview yet to British broadsheet The Telegraph, in which he talks about Apple’s design and its focus on simplicity, Steve Jobs, and the company’s current projects.