For the past 8 years we’ve struggled with what to do when we had a product idea that wasn’t related to a client. In the beginning, we’d simply let these ideas go and forge ahead with our client service work. Later, we’d try to work these ideas between paying projects. The problem with this approach, at least for us, was that in order to dedicate people to the project it meant we needed to turn away paying clients. In the early days of our business we couldn’t make that choice. We were too comfortable with client service work and too fearful of doing something different.

A few years ago we tried again, this time formalizing the process by moving a few people off client work so they could focus on building out one of these ideas. We time boxed these these initiatives and referred to them as labs projects. The process worked. We were able to focus on getting something done without going bankrupt. The labs project I’m referring to is Image Spark. Image Spark has steadily grown in popularity but it doesn’t make any money – it was never designed to. It was done simply to build something of our own from beginning to end and to take a break from client work.

Well, we’re trying something different again. This time we’re building out a small product group to conceive, design, implement and support profitable product ideas. There’s really only one constraint: Build a product people will want to buy in 60 days.

So what’s the first product?
The first product we’re launching creates digital magazines from twitter lists, tags and users. We call it TweetMag. We’re sure people will find some really unique ways to use this, but to us there will be no better way to remove the noise that often overwhelms twitter at times. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing details and screenshots of TweetMag during its development.

Follow TweetMag to stay up-to-date

Now in its fourth iteration, this version of the template has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Based on iOS4, it includes all the elements you need to design proof-of-concepts or production ready assets. Previous versions of this file we’re riddled with issues like blurry edged buttons and incorrect “bevels”. These issues have been addressed as best they can using Photoshop’s shape layers and layer styles. If you’re modifying any of the vector elements be sure the shapes are sitting on full pixels or your assets will begin to look blurry.

It should be noted that this file is still formatted for 480×320 resolution. The Retina Display version of this file will be posted once we’re able to get our hands on a production unit. We’ll also be updating the iPad version of this file, since it too needs some TLC.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPhone GUI PSD Here (7.9MB)

(Thanks to Finn O’Hara for the photo)

The iPhone GUI PSD has been very helpful for designers / developers in mocking up their apps, although in some cases it’s proved a little too high-fidelity. For rapid prototyping we found we needed a more malleable approach. This is when we turn to the iPhone Sketch Elements AI. This collection of common iPhone elements in a sketch – like style allows us to easily and quickly mock up flows of custom wireframe screens.

Below is a quick example using YouTube of how we are using this quick sketch style to present flows to clients.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPhone Sketch Elements AI Here (6MB)

(Font Requirement: To fully achieve the sketch style, you’ll need Tekton Bold — Freely available here)

Now that we’ve had a few weeks to put the iPad through its paces, it’s moved from being a novel new gadget to something that I use every day. The number one question I get when people find out I have an iPad is – what do you actually use it for?

It’s difficult to describe to people why I’d choose an iPad over my MacBook Pro while around the house. The MacBook is easier to type on, it’s more powerful, and it comes with all the latest plug-ins/extensions to make for a pretty good experience, but it also weighs almost 10 pounds and the battery now lasts a measly couple hours on a good day.

After a few days, I found myself bringing the iPad all over the house. It’s so trivial just to pick it up and throw it on the couch, have it in front of you while you’re eating a meal, or watching a TV show or movie in bed.

So what am I actually using it for?

Reading

It’s been a few months since I started using Marco Arment’s Instapaper for iPhone. Since then, I’ve moved all my medium to long-form reading from my desktop to a mobile device. Simply put, reading while sitting at your desk sucks. I can never get comfortable, and it doesn’t lend itself well enough to a comfortable reading position.

Instapaper works by providing you with a simple ‘Read Later’ link you place in your browser’s bookmark bar. Whenever you come across something you’d rather not read, or a site so riddled with ads the content is hard to process, just click the link and off it goes to Instapaper. The next time you launch the app on your phone, you’re greeted with a highly readable, stripped back version of the articles you’ve saved.

It’s a glorious reading experience, not having to be distracted by navigation, advertisements, or other distractions, and the iPad makes it even better. The latest version received a spectacular visual refresh and now includes three of the new system fonts that are included on the iPhone: Hoefler, Baskerville and Palatino. I don’t have to say much more to those of you who are typography nerds, but to the rest of you: it looks damn good and I don’t think I’ll read any blog posts on my Mac again.

Gaming

Gaming on the iPad is still an evolving landscape. While Apple likes to heavily feature the driving games where you have to tilt the device to steer, what you’ll quickly realize is that this is a lousy way to control a game, and you’ll probably just end up with sore arms. Too many iPhone OS games seem to needlessly employ the accelerometer hoping that it will elevate the level of immersion a gamer experiences while playing, but more often than not it just acts as a frustrating barrier to being able to properly play the game.

The types of games that shine on the iPad are generally pretty casual, making use of clever gestural input with little-to-no instructions required. So far, the best of the bunch seem to be those that take advantage of the larger screen on the iPad to give the player a larger area to interact with, like Scrabble or Pinball.

Godfinger is one such game that really shines on the iPad. The mechanics of the game are nearly identical to Farmville, the Facebook-based farming game with a massive user-base. In Godfinger, you’re the All Powerful One, and you’re given a world to preside over with several followers. You can build up cash by having your followers farm for gold, but need to maintain their levels of happiness in doing so.

The graphics are beautiful, and it takes advantage of a few very simple gestures to interact with the world. The game will continue to run even after you’ve quit, and will send you push notifications if anything needs your attention. You can add other friends that are playing in-game and visit each others’ worlds to help out. You can also run it on the iPhone, playing with the same world you created on your iPad.

If it wasn’t already clear, I’ll warn you outright: this game is addictive. I’ve got countless friends and a some folks at T+L hooked on it, but it’s a great example of a simple game done right on this device.

Utilities

The iPad’s screen size gives designers the opportunity to develop some pretty information-dense applications. At over four times the pixel count as an iPhone, there’s a temptation to cram a lot more on the screen at a given time. However, just like the Web, the best experiences on the iPad seem to be from the apps that show restraint and care in their information design.

I get a lot of flack around the office for my purchase of the $0.99 Weather HD, the highly (and perhaps overly) visualized weather app, but it has become one of my most frequently used apps. Why? I could easily one of the many weather apps that provide the time for sunset, sundown, the atmospheric pressure, precipitation pattern and weather radar, but who really needs any of those things?

When I’m walking out the door in the morning, all I really care about is the day’s forecast, the temperature and maybe how windy it is. The designers of this app recognized that, and deliver this information in a beautiful, visually compelling way. It’s not for everyone, but I’d sooner buy an app that does something simple really well than one that tries to do everything and ends up delivering a mediocre experience.

What’s Next?

There’s still a lot of gaps in the iPad experience and a lack of high-quality, functional apps, but developers are surely working away as we speak on many of them. Most notably, Facebook is way late to the game in delivering an iPad-friendly application (usually being first to the plate on new devices). It’s going to be an exciting year for the iPad owners as many of these apps come to fruition, and just like the iPhone’s app ecosystem, it’s surely going to take some time to flourish.

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel discussion at the IAB Canada MIXX event held in Toronto. The theme for the conference was emerging platforms and the opportunity we have to create truly innovative marketing in Canada. It was a call to action and speakers illustrated three key points:

• How Canadian media usage patterns have dramatically changed
• Why advertising within VideoGame, Mobile and Digital Out-Of-Home channels are poised to reach critical mass, and
• Where Social Media is being harnessed to drive sales.

Prior to the conference I got a chance to discuss these topics with Eyal Zilnik from One Stop Media. He delivered the presentation for the panel I was on, Do It Digital: How The Latest Advances In Digital Out-Of-Home Bring Internet, Mobile and Social Media To Life. Eyal did an excellent job of illustrating how DOOH has changed. And it was exciting to throw ideas around with someone else who gets as excited about Digital Out-Of-Home as I do. We came to several conclusions, namely

1. Marketers still regard DOOH as an animated billboard or a placement to run video loops (often running adapted TV spots without audio)
2. Few people understand that DOOH boards are more like desktop computer screens than they are Out-Of-Home billboards – they are integrated into a network with a unique IP and facilitate the full range of dynamic targeting we now take for granted in traditional online advertising, and
3. Few Canadian marketers have experimented with DOOH despite the low cost of participation, and fewer still have embraced the opportunity to link DOOH with mobile and social media.

These points were reinforced by the comments and questions we heard during our session. Several attendees came up to me after the conference and said they had no idea that the things we discussed were even possible. Maybe it’s because I’m interested in this topic but that came as a surprise.

To me, DOOH is much more than just another media tactic. DOOH will play a key role in the future of marketing. With the rise in smartphone usage and the recent introduction of the iPad (and the announcement of Apples’ iAd platform) consumers are moving away from the desktop. One only need look at consumer adoption of Facebook and the platform changes announced at F8 to understand that for many, social media is the backbone of current communication habits. Could a retail marketer integrate their social presence with DOOH (or their in-store signage network) and enable consumers to engage over mobile? Most definitely. The technology and systems are already in place.

My hope is that marketers will seize the opportunity to innovate and begin to create communication that does more than shout messages, but instead engage with consumers in new and profound ways.

Dave Stubbs is a member of the Emerging Platforms Council, IAB Canada

While Apple won’t be blessing Canada with the iPad until later this month, that hasn’t stopped some of us from crossing the border and heading directly to the nearest Apple Store. I didn’t take the road trip myself, however I was the beneficiary of one and over the past 2 days, I’ve been using my iPad quite frequently (in fact, most of this post was written using the Wordpress App).

Since its announcement and subsequent release, the general consensus appears to be a) the battery life / speed & industrial design is unparalleled, and b) the software is somewhat limiting. I’ll definitely echo these observations, however I’ve noticed much of the criticism has been focused on issues which will undoubtable be addressed in future OS updates. Everyone is busy looking at their feet, complaining about the immediate and obvious shortcomings, when they should be focused on where Apple is going with the iPad. Make no mistake about it, the iPad really is Apple’s reconception of personal computing, however they’ve only taken the first of many steps in that direction.

“It’s just a big iPod Touch”

When Apple first announced the iPad, an audible groan echoed across the Internet. It’s just a big iPod Touch appears to be the most common reaction upon seeing the iPad for the first time, and while there is definitely some validity to that observation, it’s not exactly true. Yes, the iPad looks and feels very similar to an iPod Touch, and yes they share the same operating system (which really makes them fraternal twins). However, the iPad currently sits uncomfortably between the iPod Touch and the MacBook; Born from a smartphone and wanting to be laptop replacement, but unable to reach its full stride. It wants to run—and starts to pickup pace— but then trips over it’s own feet.

Coming from an iPod Touch or iPhone, you’ll feel right at home. Sure, the screen is roughly 4x the size, but it looks and functions more or less the same. You’ve got the singular home button on the face, the same dock along the bottom, and the same lock screen (now with 4x the unused space!) . However, once you start using iPad-optimized Apps, it becomes clear that this is a different ballgame. The larger screen affords a completely unique experience, and the developer community is taking full advantage of this. It’s actually quite amazing how quickly the operating system disappears once you launch an App. The App fills the entire screen and you immediately feel like you’re holding an entirely different device. But then you try to delete something and a tiny blue dialog window appears, drowning in a sea of pixels. It feels odd and out of place, like a relic from a different era. There are all sorts of little details like this that reflect the iPads smaller-screen lineage.

You get the same feeling when you turn the iPad on for the first time, and you’re forced to tether with your computer and authorize via iTunes. Arguably, you shouldn’t have to do this with an iPhone/iPod either, but it feels even worse with the iPad. This isn’t a device that should require a separate computer. You should be able to give it your Apple ID and have everything automatically sync. Apps, email contacts, calendars… files. And this is where the iPad begins to move towards the MacBook and then stumbles. I want to save & edit files on the go, but there’s no meaningful way of managing them. While I believe Dropbox is vastly superior, Apple’s iDisk should really be the “exposed” filesystem on the iPad. It shouldn’t be an App like it is on the iPod, but a home directory that’s accessible by all Apps and sync’d across all your devices. But what happens if you’re sharing the iPad with other family members?

“The First Real Family Computer”

I’ve seen a number of people describe the iPad as the first real family computer, and I would agree that this is an apt description. My iPad will live in the kitchen and will be shared by my wife and I. However, when I started setting up my email and calendars and contacts, I realized that this wasn’t really going to work. We may want to share the device itself, however we don’t want to share applications. The iPad really needs unique user accounts, complete with independent setups. Of course, this adds a magnitude of complexity and I’m unsure if the platform can really support it. Fundamentally, the iPhone and iPod Touch were designed as single-user devices, but the iPad clearly has multi-user intentions. Being that the share the same OS underpinnings, I can see how the iPad could be weighed down by it’s resolution-deprived siblings.

I’m incredibly excited about how much potential the iPad has. I’m sure Apple will address the multitasking issues that plague it and the iPhone. I’m sure they’ll correct the odd interface holdovers its smaller siblings. And I’m hopeful they’ll introduce some sort of cloud-based solution for the file management issues. The only question is if Apple will allow for multiple users per iPad, or if they’re expecting 1 iPad per person. I have a feeling it’s the latter.

Cross-posted from the Applied Arts Wire, Image c/o Steve Rhodes.

Location-based mobile services (such as Gowalla, Foursquare and the recently launched Check In) are all the rage in the social media sphere these days, and I participate in one of them, Foursquare, to keep track of my buddies around town and on occasion get a good tip on a restaurant or bar I haven’t been to or a discount for being the “Mayor” somewhere.

As a marketer, I see a ton of positives for business to embrace these types of services, and the opportunity to provide added content to users, increase awareness and maximize the potential of mobile. The space is growing rapidly. For example, Foursquare has inked partnerships with major media players and fashion designers, Bing is now integrating Foursquare check-ins into real-time search, and mash-ups of check-ins and reviews are popping up. It’s an exciting time full of potential.

That being said, online privacy has always been a passion of mine, especially as I’ve watched the web mature over the last 15 or so years, and yet it seems to be falling by the wayside as new start-ups are launched and people fall prey to “shiny object syndrome”. I see a dark-side to these services, and one that honestly should be more top-of-mind as we continue to push the boundries between “real life” and “virtual life”.

It boils down to one simple point: be aware of what you share.

The data we’re sharing is open to all; the web isn’t a closed garden where only your friends see your data. Criminals pay attention to things like patterns: do you take the same route to work every day? Do you check-in at your physical house? Do you hang out at the same coffee shop every Saturday? We usually aren’t aware of how much our life follows a pattern and that people can use that info for ill gains. Being smart about how you use these services is a must in my book. That doesn’t mean you can’t check-in when you’re out with friends or around the city, it just means be aware of where and why you’re doing so.

It really hit home for me when I saw this tweet from SXSW (where “checking in” became a geek phenomenon – and had a charity element to it with PayPal & Microsoft donating money per check-in registered), coupled with danah boyd’s outstanding keynote on privacy online.

Let’s not make it this easy for people, shall we?

Now that Apple has officially released the iPad we want to start designing for it. While Apple’s interface builder is great, it doesn’t really allow us to create custom UI elements on the fly. We decided to take a page from our iPhone GUI PSD and create one for the iPad.

The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable. You’ll notice there are a few new UI elements as compared to the iPhone interface. The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK.

It’s 1.0 so I’m sure we’ll notice missing elements as we begin to use it. We’ll perodically update it to include new elements as we notice them or as they become available through any SDK updates.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPad GUI PSD Here (24MB)

(Thanks to Finn O’Hara for the photo)

How is it that in a time where everything is so connected and information is passed at such lightning speeds, people continue to steal, rip and defraud other members of the design community? As if somehow they’ll be able to get away with it. Yes, the internet is a big place, but its communities are still very small and well connected. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems the screens we shared of an alternative home screen for the iPhone created some buzz. We had no intention of taking it any further than a blog post but we figured this was something worth seeing through.

We got in touch with Jay Freeman a.k.a saurik. He’s the guy behind Cydia, an application for jailbroken iPhones that allows you to browse and download apps outside of actual app store. He’s crazy smart, passionate and geeky – three things we love here at T+L. Jay is going to be instrumental in making this happen.

If you haven’t already figured it out, getting this on your phone will require you to jailbreak it. That may not be an appealing option for many, but for the 2 million plus out there who have already done it and for those that are comfortable with doing it, this can be a reality.

The app and the underlying technology to make it happen are still in development so what comes out the other side will differ from what we originally proposed. The biggest change will initially be that it will render only on the lock screen. We went down this road for a number of reasons, primarily because of its relative ease of implementation, though there’s nothing easy about it. Jay is creating a framework to write custom lock screens called Cydget. Our concept will act as the guinea pig.

No word on an actual release date yet due to a last minute crash bug, but from what we hear it’s not far off. We’ll make an official announcement once it’s available. You can follow @teehanlax,
@gteehan and @saurik if you’re looking for more detail since we tend to tweet about this stuff more frequently than we blog about it.