Buz from IconDrawer has redrawn and upsized his ubiquitous Classic Icons series to 512×512. The new set is slightly smaller than its predecessor, but includes a couple of notable beauties: the new cart icon in particular is gorgeous. Purchased.
Evom
A no-frills Mac OS video conversion utility from the guys behind iPodRip. Evom is a desktop app that converts most video files to a few preset output formats, including iPod, Apple TV and YouTube-ready. I prefer the level of control and access to advanced settings that the all-but-dead VisualHub affords me, however this is quite a promising alternative. (via John Gruber)
Façade
$10 theming app for Leopard, coming soon. (via Danny Garcia)
Fontcase
I’ve been having issues of late with what seems to be the best font management tool for Mac OS, Linotype’s FontExplorer X. Suitcase scared me off some time ago, so this teaser site for a new tool called Fontcase has me interested. If it will keep my fonts activated (a task FontExplorer has trouble with) and allow me to sync activation settings to other Macs, I’m sold. (via Smashing Magazine)
That’s why Apple has standard UI widgets, so idiots like me don’t spend several minutes searching around iTunes 8’s interface trying to figure out how to make the Genius sidebar disappear.
— Dan Moren on the similarities between the Finder’s slideshow icon and iTunes 8’s hide sidebar icon. The new iTunes widget for removing the Genius sidebar is the natural progression of the hide artwork widget that’s been in that app’s footer for the last several versions, but I agree it’s entirely unfortunate that when redrawn to depict movement in the left-to-right direction, it’s uncannily similar, and potentially confusing. (via John Gruber)
Kerning, Opentype features in Firefox 3
This is one of the few areas where Safari trails Firefox, however on Mac OS at least, Firefox still has issues.
Plainview
The Barbarians are excited to share with you our latest software offering, Plainview. It’s a little something we’ve been kicking around based on a need we had internally.
A free, full-screen web browser for Mac OS, based on WebKit. I drink your milkshake. (via Tim Dawson)
Developing in a desktop environment was new to all of us and we were amazed how fickle it was. In fact, it was surprisingly similar to developing for the web, with its own text display issues and 3-pixel spacer bugs.
— Andy Budd backgrounds Clearleft’s forthcoming Silverback guerilla usability testing application for the Mac.
Adobe seems to be moving in a direction with most of their apps where they’re following neither Mac nor Windows conventions, but rather making up their own Adobe UI conventions, which conventions few of their users seem to like.
— John Gruber on the new user interface in Fireworks CS4 beta. While the single-window interface is an improvement, they’ve made a right mess of the chrome and typography. Would have been a much better idea to adopt the “pro” style of Apple’s high-end apps, but perhaps the APIs Adobe is using don’t provide hooks for that particular look and feel. Also annoying: ⌘-backquote doesn’t cycle through the app’s open document windows.
