Kombine

Beatler Launches

We’re happy to announce that Kombine recently completed a custom icon design project for Beatler. Beatler is a desktop application for Mac OS X that integrates with the popular DJ and dance music website, Beatport.com. Beatler uses an elegant iTunes-inspired interface to help users find new music and organize music tracks. We designed the large application icon for Beatler, as well as a handful of 128×128, 32×32 and 16×16 pixel icons that are used throughout the Beatler interface. Check it out.

Free Penguin Icon

Keeping with the bird theme from our recent free Twitter icon, today we’re releasing a free penguin icon. This one should work well with your Linux and other flightless waterfowl-related applications.

As with the Twitter icon, the penguin is scaled to five common icon sizes ranging from 512×512 to 32×32 pixels and comes as a set of PNG images with alpha transparency so it should work against any background. Enjoy.

Download Now

grab the Penguin icon

License

The icon is licensed under Creative Commons. However, crediting us is not necessary – basically, you are free to do whatever you want with it. If you wish to use the icon in open source software that is incompatible with Creative Commons, let us know and we’ll see what we can do to accommodate your needs.

Kombine Icons in Firefox Concept Interface

I was just reading about plans for replacing tabs in the future interface design of Firefox and was pleased to recognize a few friendly faces in the crowd. Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects has put together a concept UI which incorporates selections from our Toolbar Icons Starter Kit. Here’s the screenshot (You can see a full size version by clicking the “All Sizes” link on the Flickr page):

Most of the sidebar icons come from our stock set (along with a few from other sources). The icons look a bit squashed because they’re using the 32 pixel icons from the free set and scaling them to 16 pixels (Note: our pro toolbar icon set includes meticulously sized 16 pixel versions of these icons).

It’s great to see the icons being put to good use in the wild. Browser interfaces will doubtless evolve quickly over the coming years and we’re proud to be (even tangentially) involved in the discussion of where they should go. A few more threads in the conversation can be found at:

• Aza Raskin’s post on moving Firefox tabs to the sidebar (Aza is head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs)
• Frederic Lardinois’ article on a tabless Firefox with built-in Ubiquity at ReadWriteWeb

Oh, and Mozilla—if you’re looking for some new icon designs, we’re available to hire :-)

HARO, Twitter and the Future of Discourse

Sometimes the crucial difference between interesting and vapid journalism is found in what questions are asked. Pam Baker has asked some excellent questions about Twitter, and has come back with interesting answers.

Last month I responded to a request in Peter Shankman’s HARO [Help A Reporter Out] email from prolific tech writer Pam Baker. She was working on a piece titled Twitter and the Future of Discourse. Her query included several questions about Twitter such as:

• Is it a fad or is it here to stay?
• Will its 140 character limit on messages feed its success or prove to be a fatal flaw?
• And, is Twitter “reversing the course of intelligent conversation, taking us back to
  toddler language skills?”

I found her questions genuinely interesting, so I took some time to think through and respond to all of them. I began anticipating reading her article as soon as I sent her my thoughts, and was very pleasantly surprised to find out a few weeks later [thanks to Kreg's Google Alerts] that I’d been quoted in the article.

Since then Pam’s Twitter and the Future of Discourse Part 2 has been published on Technology News – check it out, both are worth reading. And no, not because of my two cents – there are many stronger points made by Pam herself and the others who responded to her.

Peter deserves a lot of credit for putting together HARO and making it possible for reporters to connect with an increasingly broad source of contacts for their research and writing in an efficient, timely manner. I know that without Haro this would never have happened. Thank you to Peter and Pam for giving the Twitter community [and others] the opportunity to participate in journalism in the midst of its huge upheaval, and hopefully – its renaissance.

GoodCloud Launched

We’re proud to announce that we recently helped GoodCloud launch it’s iPhone and iPod touch software development business. We designed the company logo and created the GoodCloud web site. In addition, we designed the application icon and a several tab bar icons for GoodCloud’s first product, Dialer56—the application that lets you place phone calls on the Vonage network using an iPhone or iPod touch.