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.
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With the Graphic Design Studio Combo you can quickly create professional-looking graphics – and have over 6,000 fonts at your disposal. You’ll get the ultimate collection of over 6,200 OpenType fonts with the FontPack Pro Collection and quickly create professional-looking graphics with this Graphic Design Studio. These two downloadable products will make any designers life easier by giving you the ability to have all your font needs in one place along with granting you the wizardry to create professional graphics in a fun and fast way. And you’ll get both products in this deal at far less than their usual $340 price tag. With Cult of Mac Deals you can get everything for just $69!
Almost every tech publication there is has been claiming that the next iPhone will have a 4-inch screen, culminating with the Wall Street Journal‘s report today basically confirming it, but there’s still a lot of debate over how Apple will make the screen larger without bringing on a lot of extra bulk to the device. Should they make it taller? Wider? What about making room for LTE?
Here are 12 cool iPhone 5 concepts that envision what Apple’s next iPhone might look like. If you want to know what we think, though, check out this opinion piece we wrote for Wired on why we think the 4inch iPhone makes a lot of sense.
If you’ve ever wanted an amazing library that will help you take your designs to the next level, Cult of Mac Deals has an incredible offer — an offer that’s almost all wrapped up!
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Apple's biggest manufacturing partner making preparations to turn this thing into a reality.
We have a source who claims to have seen a prototype Apple high-definition television set in action, indicating that Apple is readying the long-awaited device for market.
According to our source, who has asked to remain strictly anonymous, the Apple HDTV looks like Apple’s current lineup of LED-backlit Cinema Displays but is “much bigger.” It has a built-in iSight camera for making free FaceTime video conference calls. And it has Siri, the iPhone 4S’s voice-activated virtual assistant.
We here at Cult of Mac just can’t get enough of Instagram. It’s really hard to not love the little photo sharing app, even after it got bought by Facebook for $1 billion.
Have you ever wondered why images upload so quickly in Instagram? The whole app feels super snappy, and images can seem to upload instantly after you take a picture and apply a filter. What kind of magic is going on in the background?
As it turns out, the app’s design tricks you into believing its working faster than it really is.
If you’ve ever wanted an amazing library that will help you take your designs to the next level, Cult of Mac Deals has an incredible offer for you.
This incredible bundle of over 90 different packs of resources, including textures, icons, vectors, brushes and more. It is an invaluable resource for any designers’ toolkit. Impress yourself, your clients, and design better with The Spring Creative Bundle – which is available for a very limited time you can stack up on these digital tools for only $49!
Three years ago, WWDC sold out in a month. The next year took a week to sell out. 2011 took just 12 hours. This year took 2 hours. How fast will next year sell out?
According to Ken Segall's new book, "Insanely Simple," Steve Jobs loved the PowerMac G4 Cube, but had to let it die.
Here’s an exclusive excerpt from a new book about Steve Jobs and Apple by ex-advertising Mad Man, Ken Segall. The book is called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, and it’s on sale tomorrow. In the excerpt, we learn about Steve Jobs’s great reaction to criticism of the infamous hockey puck mouse, how he responded quickly to mistakes, and his attitudes toward the “brand bank.”
When it comes to web design nowadays, responsiveness is the key. We’re no longer looking at computer screens alone when we’re surfing the Internet. We’re looking at the web on screens that can fit in your pocket, and desktop screens are getting larger and larger. So if you’re building a website, you need to think about this: What screen sizes do you need to concern yourself with? Frankly, you need to think about all of them.
Cult of Mac Deals has got a great deal that’s set to expire that will help you learn responsive design. It’s a course that uses a step-by-step process for creating a design that rearranges content, resizes elements, and adapts itself based on the size of your visitor’s screen size. And this video course wis only $49 – 67% off the regular price!
Could this be what a unified OS X and iOS will look like?
Right now, every Mac fan is looking forward to the major next revision of OS X, Mountain Lion, which will continue what Lion started and keep on blurring the line between Apple’s Mac and iOS ecosystems. But what’s the end goal here?
Cult of Mac reader Cameron Leask put his design chops to the test to imagine what a completely unified OS X / iOS experience would look like. The result: OS XI, an operating system that merges OS X and iOS’s best features while finally ditching the Mac filesystem and embracing an iOS-like approach to data and apps.
It certainly looks sleek, but we’ll let you be the judge of that. After the jump, take an imagination-fueled tour through the future of the Mac with OS XI. Let us know what you think in the comments.
One of the saddest things about tech is that unlike other fashionable things, the aesthetic trend that might dictate what gadgets look like for a few years never gets a chance to come back into style. The most we ever get is the chance to be nostalgic about the look of an old gadget, not to fall in love with the aesthetic behind its design all over again, as if new.
For example, debatably thanks to AMC’s period drama Mad Men, Danish mid-century design has really come back into style. A whole new generation of people have come to discover and love a design trend that a mere two years ago, all but a few people would have, at best, only known by a couple musty old relics collecting dust and mouldering in their grandparents’ garage. Watching Don Draper slip into an Eames lounge chair, or pour himself a drink from a gorgeous teak sideboard, or turn on a tulip lamp designed by Eero Sarinen, though, rejuvenates these items by allowing us to see them as they were meant to be used and experienced. It removes real, living objects from the obscurity of textbooks and turns them into fresh ideas, ready to be used again.
It’s for this reason that I love seeing wood in a gadget. It takes a trend that was ubiquitous in the 70s and 80s, when home electronics were big and bulky enough to be mostly considered a kind of furniture, and presents it as a refreshing anecdote to a modern trend in tech design that puts the emphasis on more impersonal and space-age materials like plastic and metal, silicon and glass.
For me, wood can imply an intimacy — a device is yours, it was made for you — that makes it a perfect material for a smartphone: a device that is, by definition, the gadget with which most of us have our most personal relationship. And while Apple understandably doesn’t make iPhones out of wood, I’m delighted that a company like Monolithdoes, by offering a stunning line of natural wood backs for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S that are as practical as they are beautiful.
We’re no longer looking at computer screens alone when we’re surfing the Internet. With the advent of mobile technology, we’re looking at the web on screens that can fit in your pocket, and we desktop screen are getting larger and larger. Some desktop screens are larger than the television screens of not-too-long-ago. So if you’re building a website, you need to think about this: What screen sizes do you need to concern yourself with? The answer is simple: All of them.
Responsive web design is the key. And Cult of Mac Deals has got a great deal to help you learn responsive design with a course that uses step-by-step process for creating a design that rearranges content, resizes elements, and adapts itself based on the size of your visitor’s screen size. For a very limited time this video course will only cost you $49 – 67% off the regular price!
More people are recognizing Samsung because of its legal battles with Apple.
Apple and Samsung have battled in court over the design of a number of Samsung’s Galaxy products, which Apple believes were “slavishly” copied from the iPhone and iPad. However, the Korean company’s chief of mobile design maintains that the Galaxy is “original from the beginning,” and believes that one day, he will match Jony Ive by designing a truly iconic product.
Sir Jony Ive hasn’t agreed to too many interviews during his time as Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design. But the London Evening Standard has managed to tie him down for a rare interview in which he talks about Apple’s design process, and why its competitors have the wrong goals.
The D-CAN is perhaps the most sensible camera ever. Apart from the name that is
Why does a camera look like a camera? Specifically, why do our cameras all resemble a box with a lens on the front? The answer is film. Film cameras needed a dark, light-tight place to store a roll or cartridge of film, and it needed to put a viewfinder close to that lens to avoid parallax problems.
Now, though, with film long consigned to the novelty closet, the only restriction is that the sensor sit behind the lens. And that’s where the D-CAN comes in, with its telescope-shaped body.
As we all well know by now, the smallest decision in an Apple product can be the sort of thing that Cupertino designers can have spent man years deciding upon, experimenting with iteration after iteration until inspiration finally and serendipitously strikes. But this obsession with detail isn’t just visual: it goes right down to the sounds you never think twice about.
Here’s one great example, shared by sound designer Jim McKee on the 99% Invisible Podcast. The sound of your iPhone or iPad unlocking itself? It’s actually the sound a vice grip makes opening itself up.
Yet another rear panel for Apple’s iPad 3 has surfaced, refueling rumors that claim the third-generation tablet will feature a new camera and a slightly modified design to accommodate its new components.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re a big fan of HipChat, a phenomenal team calibration tool based around group chat and IM, which works on any platform with dedicated apps for Mac and iOS. In fact, it’s how we keep in touch with each other throughout each work day. The app is a mainstay in our docks.
So when we woke up this morning and found out Apple was announcing a new version of OS X including a brand new Messages IM app, the first thing we thought was: “Hey! That icon looks familiar!” Very familiar.
Like an ugly duckling transforming into a beautiful swan, VLC 2.0 for Mac also comes in black. Image Felix Kühne/Flickr
VLC, the cross-platform play-everything-and-we-mean-everything video client is about to go 2.0 on the Mac. And amongst all the new features is one very welcome change: A completely re-designed interface that makes it look a lot more at home on Apple hardware than the open-source v1.x ever did.
DUET is one of those products designed to elicit “aha” moments: it’s a vibrator that looks like a USB key. Small, slim and discreet, it has no cords, no bulky buttons and requires no batteries.
Despite Steve Jobs’s well-known war on porn, he might have approved of the guiding principles behind its luxe yet functional design.
The San Francisco-based startup behind it, CRAVE, hopes to do what Apple did for MP3 players: create a breakout product that people will want to carry around.
No more hiding your sex toys in a drawer or worrying about airport security sniggers; a soon-to-ship version dubbed DUET LUX packs memory storage like a regular USB key – an enticing twofer if ever there was one.
As you may have noticed, Cult of Mac brought in a new week with a brand spanking new redesign. Besides updating our old color scheme to be more subtly evocative of OS X Lion’s design instead of Snow Leopard’s, the guiding principle behind the new Cult of Mac design is to make it easier for our readers to know what’s new, what’s hot, what’s being talked about and what’s going on. Here’s everything you need to know about what’s new.
