I sat down and stylized some images from NASA’s Blue Marble project and this is the result. Looks like a nice place to live, doesn’t it?

Well, this is mostly the result of playing with some texture combinations, and some masking techniques. I liked how it turned out, and apparently so did some other folks since I’ve had lots of requests. So, here it is, enjoy! Full size is 2560×1600 for those of you with really big monitors.

It constantly amazes me how many AIR apps have taken the time to make custom chrome that looks nearly like a normal window, except for the color, or a little shine.  I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of it too.  My first couple of air apps had fancy styled and skinned chrome too.  I was charmed by the fact that I could make it look however I want, the ultimate control I thought.  Then I sat down and started thinking about it more seriously. Read the rest of this entry »

So, my Color Browser AIR application has been up on Adobe’s marketplace site for a while.  I’ve tried to keep it up to date, but I haven’t worried about it too much.  Then this morning when AIR went 1.0 my application managed to get featured on the download page!  So I quickly updated to 1.0 (I was still at Beta 3), and tried to fix a few things.My take-away from this:  Try not to ignore publicly available apps, and attention can come from unexpected places.

It might just be my impression of it, but this year’s MAX seemed to have a lot more for designers. With Thermo bringing the promise of more easily styled Flex apps, new extensions for most of the CS3 apps to create skins, the new filters promised in Flash 10, there was a lot of material there. It’s going to be exciting watching Flex apps move more solidly away from the “Flex Look” that seems so prevalent right now. I know I came away from it committed to stepping up the style on the apps I work on, and making them even more intuitive.

The day two keynote of MAX just wrapped up earlier today. I wasn’t expecting much, I thought we’d probably seen all the coolest stuff yesterday. I was wrong, very wrong. Thermo is going to make things very interesting. The idea of taking a photoshop mockup and converting it into an application with nice ways to create dummy data is going to be revolutionary. I’ve already heard some people grumbling about the code behind the interface, but I think it’s an awesome starting point. We need more Flex apps that don’t look like Flex apps. More free-form, more interesting. Yes people will do bad things, it’s what happens with powerful, flexible tools. Now who do I talk to so that I can get this now, instead of next year?

Well, it’s now only a few weeks away. MAX has been an awesome experience the last couple of years and this year should be even better. I just finished adding my profile to the IntroNetworks for the conference (under community on the left once you log in to the MAX website). I’m looking forward to seeing some of the folks from 360|Flex and attending some awesome sessions.