Introducing SineWave

It's been a while but we all know how life can be! I'm very excited to announce the release of my new iPhone application called SineWave. Designed for electrical engineers and students, it makes the common calculations a little faster and less error prone which is always good thing. If you forget how it all works just flip the device on its side and you are greeted with a list of formulas, examples and a little explanation.

This is my first full iPhone app and the first one to be launched worldwide on the App store! It's very exciting to see Alex Mills Design on the iTunes, a place where I spend too much of my time. I will write a post about the whole experience once it all settles down and I have a few moments free.

Please check out the website and it's iTunes page, if you do purchase the app a review/rating would be greatly appreciated :).

Awesome iPhone Ad

A friend of mine gave me this link to a parody by Saturday Night Live of the iPhone commercials Apple did with real people on the street. It's awesome, funny and pretty creative so I share it here today. Though I do not condone meth or punching cops, it's still a funny watch, check it out below. 

iPhone OS 3.0...Wow

I woke up this morning to a whole bunch of new information regarding the iPhone OS upgrade from the Apple media event and wow. Over a thousand new API's for developers including the much delayed Push Notification System, in-app purchasing, live content streaming and access to hardware to name a few. For consumers they finally get cut, copy & paste and in true Apple fashion, it works brilliantly in almost every app! I'm not going to copy what has been said on the likes of TUAW and Engadget but as of now every request I wanted for the OS has been met. This includes MMS support in the form of a new messaging app, the ability to search your music not to mention everything else, increased Bluetooth support and landscape keyboards for Mail and SMS!!!!!. They also laid to rest a few common talking points including background apps and why the Push System was delayed though the App Store Approval process got the typical/standard/boring/not helpful response from the iPhone team.

1000 new API's, that is truly incredible for any platform. They applications demonstrated at the event were very cool, putting the in-app purchasing and notifications to good use. So when the update appears in iTunes for free ($10 iTouch) sometime in June, expect some amazing applications to go with it. Obviously there is long way to go and it will be interesting to see what gets added and what gets dropped.

New iPhone website

As you can see by the previous posts that I have been focusing on the iPhone, which due to a little free time has allowed me to try somethings I have always wanted to do. I decided to make an iPhone version of the 2009 Alex Mills Design preview page. In my research for a script to tell the iPhone to use a different CSS file, I came across this tutorial. Unknown to me was the fact that the Safari browser on the phone runs a little script every time it gets rotated, with a result of either 0 (vertical), -90 (left) or 90 (right). The tutorial covers writing the javascript that intercepts the angle result from the browser, which then tells the CSS to display a certain div. So I built a vertical, left side and right side 'view' in Keynote, imaged them using skitch and built them into a neat little site using Coda.

The image below is was is displayed when the iPhone is held vertically, with instructions on how to see the other views.

Rotate the phone left and the view will change to one with links to Donald's blog and to mine. Plus another little instruction on how to return to the normal view.
Rotate the phone to the left and the view will once again change to one almost identical to the previous, except with only one link to the current website and a different rotate instruction.
Yeah I could have just put the links on one view and while this setup wont be suitable for every page, it gives you complete control over how the page works in the browser. Also the fact that it's designed for one browser on one phone* makes testing simple, though you will need an iPhone or iPod touch due to the way the CSS hides everything, making desktop testing impossible.

Check it out and let me know what you think, its just a little weekend project but I'm happy with how it turned out. Just head to www.alexmillsdesign.com with your iPhone or iPod touch and it automatically send you to the iPhone version.

*Though the webkit browser is used in a number of other mobiles including android, the detection script is only looking for iPhone and iPod in the UserAgent.

A little something...

A design project I have been working on for possibly a pretty important client. Will give more information soon. This is my first time at designing an iPhone app.