All articles by Mike

Get ready for Google Wallet

Google Wallet launched in the US today, sounds like the future has finally arrived. It promises contactless payments and the end to bulky wallets all in one universal device. More precisely Google Nexus S smartphone, with it’s NFC chip as that device.

The concept is brilliant, but like all adoptions of technology it’ll take time for it to be cast out as standard payment option. It will require everyone to upgrade to a NFC chipped phone and the cost of retail payment units to become affordable enough to replace the traditional PDQ machine. I mean the old paper cheques are still being accepted in our ultra technological world!

Anyway watch the video and have a glimpse into the standard payment of the future!

Zite: Intelligent Personalised Ipad Magazine

Zite dubs itself the personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it. Zite gives you personalized news, articles, blogs, videos and other content from a variety of both mainstream and niche publications and sites. Zite can personalize by syncing with your Twitter or Google Reader account or on its own.

The interface looks nice enough and the whole concept seems like a combination of stumble upon meets amazon recommends and aims to be a rival to the popular Flipboard App.

3M’s Multi Touch Bendable Display

3M have invested a lot in pioneering research and are really trying to push things forward by introducing a new flexible micro pattern product which hopes to shape the future. (Quite literally!) It will be sold as a product to existing manufacturers and hopes to be the standard for malleable touchscreen technology.

The possible uses of the “flexible transparent conductor” could be a fully functional touchscreen wrist strap, e-publications or gaming devices as shown in the concept video below.

You can see an explanation of the technology below (unveiled at this years CES 2011).

iOS Dev Weekly – Free weekly iOS dev newsletter

Chester Based iphone and ipad developer/trainer Dave Verwer has just set up a new weekly newsletter for fellow iOS developers who need a weekly burst of inspiration and iOS dev love. Issue 1 about simulating poor network conditions has just been mailed out – so get on it quick!

All you have to do is just sign up on the iOS Dev Weekly site

Dave is a seasoned veteran and runs the iOS dev company Shiny Development. He has direct experience in designing, developing, shipping and marketing successful apps to running extensive training courses.

For more information you can follow Dave Verwer on Twitter.

Ten awesome iPhone cases

There’s tons of cases on the market, but we thought we’d highlight a selection of the slightly odd, fun and silly ones some of which you probably wouldn’t buy.

Vintage 80′s Gameboy cases

Little Black Book

Leica M9 Camera Skin with Transparent Case

Cassette Case Back Cover

Totoro iPhone Case

McLovin iPhone case

18k Gold case with 200 Diamonds Worth ($100,000)

Rosewood Wood Case & Stand

Retro Calculator Case

Chocolate Bar Silicone case

Review: HTC Cha Cha – The phone for facebook socialites

We’re all about devices that can make communication that little bit easier here at MOFU, so we were delighted to receive the new HTC Cha Cha to test and review. The HTC Cha Cha is aimed squarely at 14-21 market, it currently has an average UK contract price of £20 per month, and a sim free cost of £200.

It’s been dubbed one of 2 (non-facebook) facebook phones alongside the HTC Salsa!

In fact it’s so highly regarded that Mark Zuckerberg praised the deep social integration. (See video)

It’s not the prettiest phone out there, it doesn’t have the highest spec, but it offers an experience that we may see more of in phone standards of the future.

The most noticeable thing about this Android Gingerbread phone is the big ass facebook button at the bottom. You’re supposed to notice it. It’s designed so that no matter where you are in you’re menu screen you can access and post to facebook in an instant.

In fact it pulses when you take a picture (like some kind of primal heartbeat), to ensure you instantly upload the snap of you and your mates. It bypasses the clunky app interface you find on other phones, by allowing you to make status updates with one click. Just viewed a site you like? Press the facebook button. Listening to some tunes? Press the facebook button to tell people what you’re listening to. It’s the physical equivalent of the facebook like button! Want to check in on facebook places? Just hold down the facebook button a little longer. Super easy, super usable!

Super usable too, because of it’s Dual touch screen and keyboard interface making messaging a doddle for those who have more ‘slightly rounded fingers’. Although the screen size will inevitably be a challenge to those who are used to the HTC desires or iphones of this world I think it’s a small sacrifice for a full qwerty keyboard. After all this phone was designed for the message-savvy heavyweights out there.

So much so, that facebook messages show up in the phone’s unified inbox, alongside emails and texts. Which although a little confusing at first, really drives home the fact that HTC are trying to make your life a bit easier. The ChaCha will also check your address book to see who’s online in Facebook Chat – so you can get IM’ing your heart out!

Although there are many other great features such as a 5MP camera, this phone is all about the deep social linking and how it plans to lead the way in making things as simple as possible for us all. With the iphone and ios5 soon to integrate natively with twitter, it will be interesting to see which brands side with which social networks. Either way I believe this is the start of a slew of much more effective social based devices than we’ve seen before.

Win one of 6 Piolos! The perfect little iphone 4 stand!

When Sheffield based Industrial Designer Andrew Bond was looking for a stand for his iphone 4, he struggled to find one that suited his needs – so he decided to design one himself! This little iphone 4 stand is perfectly formed from a thin strip of thermoplastic elastomer to keep it sleek and pocket size. It even has a hole to hook it onto a keychain. Perfect for the consummate traveller who likes to watch films, youtube and other media on the go!

It’s a commendable story of a design being born out of necessity, and we at MOFU always like to support independent home-grown creativity! And so should you! You can pick up a Piolo for the measly sum of £4.00 from the Piolo Shop – that’s less than a couple of pints of beer! And read the full story on the Piolo Site.

 

BUT WAIT… You can win one of 6 Piolos right here at MOFU!

 

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All you have to do is go to The Piolo Facebook Page, ‘LIKE’ it and  leave a comment about why you would like to win a Piolo. It’s as simple as that!

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THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. THE WINNERS WERE:

Laura Jayne Poyner
Lisa Williamson
Ricky Koya
Tracy Nixon Mse
Ben Cooke
Chelsea Welch

If you’re one of the winners above, please email mike@mofuture.com with your postal address and you will be sent a Piolo in the post!

Get liking, commenting and why not share with 5 of your friends? You could all be winners!

 

INTERVIEW: Cosmic Mission (aka Fabio Basile)

Tell us all about Cosmic Mission and what it’s all about.

Cosmic Mission is my company, is my little shop front to the wide web
It’s currently being overhauled as I will be offering different types of services just after the summer, a designer is never happy with his / her site and I spend a lot of time scrapping ideas and tweaking pixels.

What software do you use?

I try to keep my toolset pretty minimal although as I enjoy designing and developing stuff I have to use a variety of apps for the right tasks, on the graphical side I use almost daily Adobe Photoshop CS5, mostly for pixel work, websites and UIs. It’s a very powerful tool with incredibly frustrating issues but I have yet to find a good replacement, and Adobe Illustrator CS5 which I use mostly for designing glyphs and vector icons and the occasional font rendering.

On the programming side I use Apple XCode 4, for anything iOS and Mac OS related, TextMate for coding the websites I design and for scripting in Ruby on Rails. I am also a heavy user of git and GitHub for versioning my data (both code and graphics).

Finally two apps that I can’t live without are Dropbox, it’s just magic how you can share your drafts with your clients and Backblaze for automatic offsite backups of all my data, just in case something goes wrong

What methods or processes do you have for designing user interfaces?

I have an almost set routine whenever I need to create User Interfaces, typically I begin with paper and pencil, I find Field Notes to be particularly useful whenever I am around, I am not very talented when it comes to hand drawings but it’s a great way of expressing myself by quickly jotting down ideas without spending too much time in Photoshop and without getting too attached to a particular interface just in case the client wants to scrap it.

I send daily updates to all my clients and when we both agree on a particular design I sketch it out in Photoshop using very simple shapes and basic gradients, the most important thing is to get the usability right, once the interface feels right we refine the rest, creating icons, glyphs, patterns etc.

Do you have any tips for people looking to start getting involved with mobile UI / how did you get started?

This is a bit of a tricky question for me I started out as a software engineer specialising in games development and games mechanics without a background in design but I felt more passionate about design up to the point of switching my career and concentrating on just designing things for a while. I would recommend to start tinkering with Photoshop and user interfaces for mobile applications, they are a great for learning since you are restricted by the screen size and sometimes limitations are a great incentive to innovate and get creative.

I started in a similar manner, trying to make money while I was at University

What’s been the most interesting app you’ve been involved with?

I was lucky to work on great apps and with some talented people, if I have to name the most popular one then I would go for the newly released Tap to Chat 2, the guys at Osmosis Apps loved what I created for them up to the point of using the icon as the logo for their new company.

Who do you look for inspiration when designing?

Dribbble is my best source of inspiration for sure, there are so many talented artists it’s just incredible what some people can achieve. I also look at traditional art and printed advertising as a secondary source of inspiration.

What good apps have you seen recently?

Sparrow email client, which I use for my various email accounts, and
Fantastical app which has to be the best around, great UI and really useful if you don’t like fiddling with Calendars.

What will you be working on in the coming months?

The summer period is always busy for me, I am booked to work on some exciting new projects for the guys at Shiny Frog, I can’t really say much right now but if you are reading this interview I am sure you’ll find their apps extremely useful (hint hint)! Just keep an eye on my Twitter feed.

I have also managed to finish a couple of contracts with some big names like Clinton Cards, ZOO Magazine and Imogen Thomas, so I hope they will have more projects for me shortly

Apps that Cosmic Mission has been involved in:

Some of the bigger apps are not out yet, the developers have been working hard squashing bugs before the big 1.0 so unfortunately I can only show what’s already available:

1TapAlarm (for iPhone and iPad)
Tap to Chat 2 (for iPhone and iPad)
Eavesdrop (iPhone)
Instinctiv (mobile and desktop) http://www.instinctiv.com/
Social Tunes (iPad, icon only)
Emerge app (iOS, enterprise)
Sally Park (iOS, graphics refresh)

and many more apps that are either for internal use only or yet to be released.

Bookmark the Cosmic Mission site or follow Cosmic Mission on Twitter.

ios5 is truly magic

With the hotly anticipated ios5 imminent, Magician and performance artist Simon Pierro runs us through a beta preview on his iPad. It’s truly magical stuff.

Superdry Enterprise ipad App

Apps are fast becoming a useful tool within larger organisations to distribute information quickly and easily.

Digital agency, Digital White have launched an iPad enterprise app service which helps their clients and their businesses deliver B2E (business-to-employee) apps to their workforce. This new service allows businesses to upload, distribute and install freely, easily and securely their B2E apps. These apps are designed to cut costs, increase efficiency within an organisation and increase sales opportunities.

It is only recently that businesses have recognised the full potential of internal apps or enterprise apps. These apps are tailor made for the specifications of each individual business.

Commercial Director of Digital White, Alex Holt, emphasises that this enterprise app development has “the potential to improve all parts of a business, including monitoring the effectiveness of a sales team, creating inspiring brochureware for customers, reporting on faults within the production line, understanding the financial health of each department and saving on printing costs”.

Large fashion retailer, Superdry, were the first company to realise the opportunity that enterprise iPad apps held. Focused on improving their customer experience and organisational processes they wanted the ability to create apps internally as a tool for improving inter-company communications, reducing costs and streamlining internal processes.

Superdry are now producing an app almost every day.

A quote from Digital White

“Superdry are our latest enterprise app client. We worked with them to design a private and secure platform for them to create, edit and share apps internally. The system allows apps to be distributed to an unlimited number of staff, vary access rights to ensure only the relevant employees have access to each app and email users notifying them if an app is updated. This system not only improves the quality, efficiency and speed of internal communication but also saves money by lowering printing costs.”