QuickPost Beta 3 Sneak

It's been a substantial amount of time since the release of beta 2 but unfortunately education commitments have taken the important center stage. Beta 3 was meant to be released today but this is not the case and to further annoy the anxious users, the next 3 to 4 weeks will be spent mainly on work and school. It will be a while before Beta 3 will be released, but it will be worth it, as you will see in the demo below it has a whole bunch of slick refinements and exciting new features. 

The demo is what we have built so far, introducing support for Wordpress and further refining the current services as well as making the app simpler and easier to use. Something which I'm proud about with this demo is that every submitted bug from Beta 2 has been fixed and refined. Each request and tester report has been taken very seriously, as you will see there are some massive changes to how the app looks and behaves. Please enjoy the demo and remember that an enormous amount of time has been spent on this project, so I ask for your patience during this busy time of the year. Thankyou!. 

QuickPost Beta 3 Preview from Alex Mills on Vimeo.

WWDC 09 Predictions

It's now time for my regular pre-event predictions and this time it's the much awaited Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2009, held at the Moscone center in San Francisco. I'm extremely excited as previously the only real announcements from this event were mac hardware and software, while this year we have Mac OS X iPhone (What Apple officially calls it), and Mac OS X Snow Leopard plus a whole bunch of other hardware to go with them. Let's get into it.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

From a consumers point of view this release doesn't appear to be too much but if you are a business person or developer, it's time to get excited. Previous releases, Leopard in particular, were a whole bunch of new features whereas Snow Leopard will be a bunch of new features for developers. New technology to handle multiple core intel processors called Grand Central, the ability to tap into the vast amounts of wasted power in graphics cards and a complete cleanup and streamline of the operating system. This gives developers like myself new tools, technologies and visual features in our own applications, and in true Apple fashion, with little effort.

A couple things I would like to see in particular from an interface designers point of view is the actual tool that was patented to create resolution independent buttons and elements. At the moment to do this in leopard involves subclassing components of buttons etc which is pretty messy. Plus improved toolbars, token fields and easier Core Data migration. It will be interesting to see though if Apple does come through with the new marble interface or something similar, personally if it's going to look anything like the glass in iTunes and iPhoto it will be horrible. They finally got consistent interfaces with Leopard, lets not do a Tiger have 4 please. It would be really sweet if Snow Leopard goes on sale right away.

iPhone V3/Video/Video 3G or whatever it's going to be called

Unfortunately with all the amazing work that's gone into Snow Leopard, any sort of announcement about the iPhone will take center stage. We have already seen the new spotlight and cut/copy/paste in Mac OS iPhone 3.0 so I would believe that it will be mainly about new hardware if the recent rumors have anything to do with it. My requests for a new iPhone would be:

• Better camera... please a better camera
• Improved scratch resistance
• Better bluetooth (Demoed in iPhone 3.0)
• Improved battery life
• Better screen!!!!!!
• More screen colours
• Cheaper
• Optus allowing to upgrade at no cost :)

Best of luck to everyone at WWDC this year, my best wishes to Steve Jobs and I hope to see you all next year when QuickPost will make it's conference debut!