Naturally Fresh

This app was a project for a great dressing, sauce, and dip company out of Georgia, Naturally Fresh. The free app has a recipe finder – highlighting all the things you can do with their products besides just put it on salads – which allows you to browse all of the recipes, or search by the type of meal you need to prepare. The app also shows off all of their different dressings, as well as offers a store locator.

This was my favorite screen to work on... the product fridge.

The free app launched today, and is available on the iTunes App Store.

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WhatKey Launches

Two weeks ago I teased the icon, and now today is the official launch day of WhatKey. Internally, we’ve been calling it CapSee’s Brother because it uses the same bezel notification that CapSee uses, but for a different purpose. WhatKey is designed to help you know what key Apple is telling you to hit with its keyboard shortcuts.

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I use Macs exclusively, and I still do not know which key to hit when an app says to hit the ⌥ key. We created WhatKey to help with this. Simply hold down one of the modifiers keys for a couple of seconds (control, option, command) and a bezel will display showing you which symbol matches that key.

WhatKey runs in the background and only appears when you hold a key for a while, so it’s not intrusive or annoying.

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Apple Portables

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Jot Icon

This is an icon for our latest product called Jot. We had the product about 90% complete and still had no name or icon when I woke up at 3 am with an idea for both. I’ve shared a couple final icon designs here before, but this time I thought I’d share the design process a bit more.

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When I had my early morning epiphany, I thought about my old typewriter which sits on the shelf in the hallway outside my bedroom (similar to the photo here). I thought to myself, this is perfect... we’ll use the look of the old typewriter and the name, “Jot”. I’ll have a sheet of paper come out of the typewriter with the word “Jot” typed on it. I wanted to design it right then, but I wasn’t sure Craig would go for my idea, so instead I lost a few hours sleep.

As soon as Craig woke up and approved the idea, I sketched it on a sheet of paper. Funny side note, my scanner was acting up so I had to use my digital camera to take a photo of the sketch instead!



From there I started making the pieces of the icon as shapes. These are the numerous shapes and layers on top of the sketch.



One thing that was difficult for me on this design, is that I am an exact pixel kind of guy. Typically I setup 1,000 grids. The grids line up to the rulers, and everything line up to the grids. On this particular piece, I decided to try to build it without any grids at all. It was a fun challenge to change my usual habits.

After the shapes were put into place, I had to make each piece look real. I can’t explain exactly how I did that, but here’s the finished product.

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Does the iPad Cost Too Much?

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Mystery Icon

Craig and I are working on a follow-up utility to the successful CapSee app we made last week. We’re calling this one WhatKey. I can’t tell you what this one is going to do, but I wanted to show you the icon I came up with.

And yes... this one is actually a real utility. Not like our INSANELY popular CHOCKSEE utility (62,738 and counting).

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Does Jesus CHOCKLOCK?

Me: Did you see the latest tweet about CapSee? It’s not in English... looks Chinese or Japanese.

Farley: MOTHER OF MERCY I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE!

Me: I used Google to translate. It says, “This is good, Jesus!”

Craig: Maybe Jesus will tweet how much he likes it too.

Me: I wonder if Jesus bumps his caps lock key.

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CapSee is 7th!

In only two days, our free mini-app, CapSee, has become the 7th most popular Apple download!


We’ve managed to displace some pretty big names in the Mac software community like Cyberduck, Stuffit, and Bento. And we’ve also topped a little known app called Google Earth. The six apps above us might be tough to nudge though. Still above us is Flip4Mac, Microsoft Messenger, Firefox, iWork, Quicktime, and iTunes.

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CapSee

It really bugs me when I think I’m hitting the “a” key and I really bump the caps lock key. Then I end up typing a whole line of text in all upper case. I told Craig they should make an on-screen notification for the caps lock key. After all, on the Mac you get notice of other keys, like the volume keys, screen brightness, keyboard backlights, and disk eject. So why not the caps lock? Craig agreed, and Craig delivered.

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Introducing CapSee... the latest (free) Mac OS app from Threemagination! Simply download, copy to your applications folder, and run. CapSee will run in the background and whenever you hit the caps lock key, you will see a bezel (like the image above).

Seems like every time I work on a new project with Craig, I get to do something I’ve never done before. This time was no different. In this case, I had to create the screen bezel images, the little icon you see in the upper menu, as well as the application icon. But this time around I had to make a DMG image (which is like a virtual disk), and so I had to create the layout you see once you open the virtual disk, seen here:

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Here I Am!

Craig was lamenting one day that his wife will invariably text him while he’s on the road, asking where he is. By the time he texts back (which is illegal in the State of California), he’s no longer in that location! The common response anymore is, “There should be an app for that.” And now there is! We released Here I Am this week.

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Craig and I actually released two versions of the app. The first, Here I Am - SMS/Email, gets your location via the iPhone’s GPS and sends a text or email of your location to whomever you designate in the settings. This solved the issue Craig was having with his wife.

But as I was doing the initial testing of the app, I was standing in line for Space Mountain at Disneyland, and I wanted to be able to brag about this to a couple of my friends who really like the ride. I fired off a text to Craig and suggested we do a second version of Here I Am, and so Here I Am - Twitter was born. This version also gets your location via the phone’s GPS, but instead tweets your current location – a satellite image of your location – to your twitter feed! Great for bragging about being on the ski hill instead of stuck at work!

Both apps are on sale right now for only a buck each in the iTunes app store.

When I was doing the design for the app, I thought it would be cool to have a map overlay, and I decided to use some place real... an actual location somewhere in the world, as opposed to just making up streets and roads. Apple uses their headquarters for the map icon on the iPhone, but the area for Threemagination’s headquarters looks pretty boring. I moved on to trying important places in my life, like birth place... where I live, etc. But all of those places were boring to look at too! So instead I went for a location that just looked neat.

The Contest

Yesterday, Craig and I were discussing the location I chose... a location he still hasn’t found. I said, “It would be fun to see how many people could figure out were in the world this map is.” Craig seems to think if you let anyone and everyone try, you’d get someone to figure it out in under 10 minutes. So we decided to have a contest... and a little side bet between us.

On the Threemagination web site, you can try to guess where in the world this map is. All the details and rules are there. If you are the first to get it right, you get a $50 iTunes gift card. Even if you’re not first, you could win one of five $10 iTunes gift cards.

If someone gets it before the 10 minute mark, I have to buy Craig lunch. So I’m hoping no one is that clever!

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Benefits of a Featured App

Yesterday I mentioned the process Craig and I went through when Numbrix (iTunes Link) became a featured iPhone app. Today I wanted to discuss the benefits of being featured and being listed in the “New and Noteworthy” section on the iTunes app store.

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As you might expect, you get a significant jump in your sales from being featured. The day the game was featured, it started selling 10 times the volume it was selling prior to the placement. And while – as expected – those numbers didn’t hold once the featured placement was over, the numbers never dropped back to “pre-feature” levels.

Aside from additional sales – which was great, of course – being an iTunes featured app certainly has particular bragging rights associated with it. Being able to tell people that your app was one of the few that got that spot is actually pretty important. As Jeffrey Zeldman recently wrote regarding self-promotion, being able to tout your product obtained this unique position is worthy of being mentioned. You shouldn’t be ashamed to brag about it!

But from a pure sales standpoint, oddly enough, the featured banner is not the best position to be in the iTunes app store. At the time your banner would be one of three banners across the top of the app store. Now there are three that slide down, but the issue is the same. The banners switch, so occasionally your graphic isn’t showing at all. In the iPhone app store, there are only two banners showing, so your banner may never appear.

What Craig and I found was the “New and Noteworthy” section was much more valuable in terms of exposure and sales. Being listed here lasted the entire month of July, as opposed to only the single week. Additionally, our icon showed up in the “New and Noteworthy” section all of the time, unlike the on and off of the banner rotation I mentioned above. The icon showed up all of the time in the iPhone app store as well. As a result, we realized up to 30 times our normal sales volume during these weeks... three times what we got during the week of the featured placement!

We had a couple other fun mentions from Apple as well, and we didn’t expect some of the benefits we gained from these. For example, we were listed under “Staff Favourites” in the UK and Australia. (I thought maybe it would be in Canada too, since they use the extra “U” in words too... but not so much.) This introduced us to a large population of customers that we would not have otherwise reached, since Numbrix primarily only appears in US publications. Now we just have to figure out how to spend these British Pounds!

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Becoming a Featured App

Back in May, Craig and I released Numbrix (iTunes Link) for the iPhone, which is a game owned by Parade magazine. Getting a chance to work with Parade has been an amazing experience. Making that experience even more mind-blowing, the app got featured placement on iTunes app store. For an iPhone geek like me, it was definitely one of the highlights of my year! Since I haven’t seen people discuss it, I thought I would share how exactly becoming a featured app goes down.

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In mid to late May we get an email from a gentleman at Apple, whom we will leave unnamed for this discussion. I can tell you this much, his email address was simply his first name at apple.com... and it was not Steve. Anyway, he tells us we “might” get featured, so we need to get some graphics put together... just in case.

This was rather tough. First off, we had to create a banner graphic knowing that we might not even get the placement. Second, we got the email at 4:52pm on a Tuesday, and needed to have the graphics back to him by the close of business that Friday! Third, Apple has pretty specific requirements on what these graphics had to be.

You have to provide Apple with two or three separate images.

The first is the title treatment/logo for the application. It has to be a vector graphic, or a minimum of 600x600 transparent PSD. It needs to be simple and easy to read if scaled down to a small size.

The second is the background. This can be a background image, a texture, a color, or a gradient, and it should correspond to the application or compliment the title treatment. This may include elements of the application, but should not include screenshots. It had to be a 900x530 layered PSD.

The third image is optional, which could be the company logo. They simply requested a high-res image with alpha channel.

Finally, Apple points out that they want the ability to place the title on the background “where it would best fit for the particular piece or web page being designed.” So you have to make your design in such a way that your title treatment can move around in any way that Apple sees fit once you pass along the various files to them.

I dropped everything I was working on to get something created. Keep in mind, I have to get this over to Parade for their approval before getting it back to our new friend at Apple! I manage to barely meet the Friday deadline... and then we wait. We are told that he’s going to suggest our app for the featured placement in their monthly meeting. At this point, I think there were about 50,000 apps in the store that we are competing with for the coveted space. We were told we might not hear anything back, we’ll just have to keep watching the store to see if it goes up. We did know that it wasn’t suppose to be for the month of June, so to keep an eye out the first Sunday in July when they do their next change.

The first week of July rolled around, and we checked the featured apps. Numbrix was not there. We were very disappointed. But then we looked down an inch and there’s this space called, “New and Noteworthy”, and smack dab in the middle of that section is the Numbrix icon. Craig and I figured this wasn’t a bad consolation prize!



Tomorrow, I will cover the benefits of this placement versus the featured placement.

But after the emotional roller-coaster ride, becoming comfortable with our “noteworthy” status, and a couple of weeks, we actually got featured placement!



The app has been reviewed in MacWorld, a magazine I’ve been reading since I was a kid. It’s been featured in iTunes, as well as receiving several other choice mentions from Apple. With those personal accomplishments, aside from getting to drive a firetruck, I can’t think of any other boy-like fantasies I need to fulfill to make my life complete!

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iPhone App Icon: Twist It!

Twist It is a gimmicky app for the iPhone. The point of the app is to pretend your phone is the grip of your bike and Twist It to hear your bike rev up. Again, the app developer needed an icon that visually explains what this app does.

I created the generic grip in Photoshop horizontally level. I created a flat layer, adding monochromatic noise, and used the warp tool to “wrap” the layer around the grip for a more realistic feel.

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The twisted arrow was broken down into two groups of layers. The front group was made using three shapes, plus one layer for the effects. The back of the arrow is a single layer, with a mask to hide the parts I don’t need.

Once the grip looked right, I created a copy of all of the layers and flattened it. Then I used the distort option to get the perfect angle.

The actual graphic that was submitted to Apple did not have the rounded corners or the glare that you see here. The app developer submitted it without the effects and let the App Store add in the effects after the fact.

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Ideas!

We launched our latest free project today. It’s a simple little web app that Craig and I made to help us keep track of project ideas. Since the concept worked so well for us, we decided to make it available for everyone.

It’s pretty simple. For each app idea you have, simply enter five things: name, description, price, dev time, and type (iPhone or web app). Then drag them around on screen in the order you think they should be done. That’s it! It also has some nice features like collaboration and notifications.

More information and a fully working demo are available here.

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iPhone App Icon: zCalc

The primary use of zCalc is to determine how much material one needs given the dimensions of an area. The developer asked if I could make a suitable icon. I felt the icon should incorporate a tape measure and, logically, a calculator.

I grabbed my tape measure out of the garage and sketched several angle shots. None of the initial concepts gave the user any indication of what the app did, and the more detailed ideas were too difficult to see when sized down to standard icon size.

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Finally, after staring at my tape measure – and a checkerboard Photoshop canvas – for way too long, it hit me. The side profile is already the shape of the standard rounded corner app icons! (Duh.) Using the side profile conveniently provided the circle area where most tape measurers display their branding... perfect placement for calculator buttons. Rounded buttons best fit the design, so I went with buttons that were reminiscent of almost identical to the original iPhone’s calculator icon.

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About Darren Beckett

I am 50% of Threemagination, an “ideas studio” in Southern California, owned by myself and my friend, Craig. My role in the company mostly deals with the interface design, but I also have been known to dive into the code. This is a journal that talks about some of the fun stuff I’ve been working on.

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darrenbeckett.com was created using my own blog software. After several attempts at trying the big ones, I gave up and made my own. At some point I plan to wrap it up into a nice package and allow others to use it. But chances are, by the time I get around to it, blogging will be so 2009.

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