Oh my, My Apple Genius!

The song and music video, conceived by my talented activist great friend Miss Lauren Larken, criticizes the veil between a person being truly personal and a technical support acting personal for your services, while suggests that a corporate love is perhaps possible as well as we break our preconceptions and let our imagination go wild.

The kids staged a few improv dances inside and outside Apple Stores around Manhattan a couple weeks ago. I was in the dance, too, making fun of the Apple products that I love and hate, while handing out heart-shaped balloons that resemble their oh-so-glorious logo.

The video was released on Valentines' Day, and a few performances followed.

On the back side of the project, I also designed the animation for the opening and the karaoke session. Everything was done in Adobe AfterEffects and Illustrator, the same tool I used for the over-the-top Trillian Astra preview movie. (Watch it over and over again while it's still up!)

Faking the space with some simple polar distortion. Well, not so good.

Simple 3D layers and motion paths were used, plus a few custom space-y background effects inspired by tutorials of Andrew Kramer. His tutorials are intuitive and helpful, and I would recommend everyone to watch them if you are interested in animation effects more advanced than Flash.

"Subtle arrogance" through font weight: Notice how there is hardly a U, there is only i.

Imitating Apple is always educational, as you learn how to restrain yourself from using way to many effects while giving the products a nice professional finish. Just having a few pixels or centimeters off will ruin your composition, while picking the wrong highlights and shadows will end up looking like a fake. However, make sure you don't end up ripping off the whole design!

An Icon for a Group of Chat Rooms

Another day, another incremental build forward for Trillian Astra. As the new build 77 features a new Chat Room Browser UI design, I designed a few new icons to accompany it.

The main problem of a "Chat Room" icon is that there is hardly ever a general icon designed for it. A search on Google Images for idea reveals nothing particularly interesting:

Most designs retreats to the method used by Chinese characters as concepts get more and more complicated, i.e. 3 chat bubbles imply that it is not 1-to-1 conversation, thus a chat room or a conference:

This design would work, but, until the concept of "Chat Room Groups" come up in the Yahoo! Chat Browser. And very soon we would find ourselves drowning in the vortex of the most complicated Chinese character if we put forward such logic:

The solution is to replace the icon with a new concept. In this case, I drew a little House with a chat bubble blowing through its chimney to represent a Chat Room. As users learn that a house represents a Chat Room, they will also understand that a few houses represents a group of Chat Rooms. (Let's see how many other chat clients and chat sites would rip this idea off.)

I know, this is pretty minute, but it saves you from a bubble bath in the Chat Room Browser. :)

Temptation of Saint Anthony

So the story goes: One night, Anthony the Great was faced with great temptations. Lucifier, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Martyrs, the Magicians, the Pagan Gods, Science, Lust and Death and the Monsters came out to stray him from his belief that isolation is the truest form of worship. And of course, our persistent protagonist survived all temptations and came out to be the greatest.

And somehow the story inspired and is translated into a technological commodity such as a Trillian skin. You are now the protagonist and have to survive from all these temptations, as angels and devils are in constant conflict on your very Contact List. Slay the devil with the sword in 90's-style violence. And which friend to trust and not trust? (Ok, that's a long stretch.) Wait, and if Science is one of the temptations, should you just ditch your computer all together and become Amish?

Nevertheless, here it is, the skin, appropriate to the atmosphere of Halloween: a pagan holiday that is in constant (now non-existent in the modern world) conflict with All Hallow's Eve.

Here are the steps to install this piece of holy parable/blasphemy on your Trillian desktop:

1. Download skin from http://www.arkidect.com/files/Temptation-Build1.zip
2. Extract to Trillian\skins folder, and it should form "Trillian\skins\Temptation of Saint Anthony" by itself without you creating a folder.
3. Go to Trillian Astra Preferences -> Skins -> Custom Windows
4. Select "Temptation of Saint Anthony" from the list. Very tempting, huh?
5. Click "Apply Skin" at the bottom.

Important Note: This skin works for Trillian Astra only. To get the functions you normally get from the menus, you can right-click on the contact list window, or right click on the Trillian system tray icon.

Now, here's the hint, grab the sword and slay the demon!

Happy Halloween!!

Think Different (Part 3)

This is a 3-part series on porting Trillian across platforms, particularly Mac OS X. It would make more sense if you start reading from Part 1. Thanks for your interest!

Coherence across platforms

Meanwhile, the second question is the coherence of the product between different platforms. If the user switches between Web and Mac OS X often, it would be nice if their experiences are around the same. Our web version is a very delicate replica of the Windows version, so that transition between Web and Windows is very smooth. Users don't need to re-learn how to use again, as it is conceived as one single product. It would be not convenient if in one OS the toolbar is at the top, and in another the toolbar is at the bottom.

In order to provide a familiar experience for all Trillian Astra users across the platform, we use the same skin through out. While we made a lot of changes to accommodate the ease of use in Mac OS X, the form of the contact list window remained the same - with its signature curved bottom housing a variety of controls - and it works well for the identity of the instant messenger as well.

The OS X version of Cordonata has an overall flatter "lacquered and polished steel" appearance that is based on Leopard. I am not completely sure about the darkness of the window yet, but it seems most windows in Leopard are very gray. We have also flattened the bottom buttons to follow the new toolbar buttons in Leopard.

Font choice varies across the platforms. It makes sense because certain system fonts do not exist on other systems. Default font of respective operating systems are used as a result, while in Flash we will try to adapt to both.

Other Trillian-centric behaviors are kept in spots where familiarity between Trillian products weighs more beneficial than familiarity between Trillian and OS X, and where there were no precedents in Mac OS X. For example, we use the same toolbar in both Windows and Mac to showcase all the IM services the user is using.

So this concludes my 3-part series on porting the design of Trillian to Mac OS X. Please feel free to send me comments on what you would expect on the designs of Trillian. Thanks!

Think Different (Part 2)

Coherence with Mac OS X

 

There were two stages in the design of the windows. While critics may say it is unnecessary to design anything new with the use of HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) from Apple, it is in no doubt instant messaging requires a large variety of new controls.

For instance, Apple had to introduce chat bubbles in iChat to distinguish individual messages in a conversation. In the contact list, there are no standards between how contacts are laid out. Some have two lines, some have one line. iChat has buddy icons in the size of 28x28, which is not a nice size as it has to shrink down a buddy icon usually 48x48 or 50x50 in size. It is also difficult to pick which control to use. Windows Live Messenger for Mac is the only messenger that uses the true list control from OSX, while iChat simply do away with groups for tidiness.

Tabs are also another questioned area in OS X. While iChat in OS X Tiger have tabs at the bottom, iChat in Leopard moved the tabs to the left for the new Source List look, and Safari still have tabs at the top. Yahoo! Messenger followed suit to have tabs at the bottom to be as 'authentic' as possible.

Therefore, custom controls are needed no matter what, but the question is how we can design it so it looks like a part of the OS.

Of course, the necessity of custom controls is not the license to go crazy in the design. In order to pay respect to the users of Mac OS X, we paid attention to a lot of details so it can be easier to get used to.

We made numerous small changes in the base version of Trillian Cordonata, the default skin of Trillian. Of two most obvious changes, the window buttons are moved to the position where OS X users are used to. The Zoom effect also maximizes the contact list to its content only. We are also going to make the scroll bar comply with the system setting so the arrow buttons will fall into the right place. The glow and selected states of list items will also correspond to the color settings in System Preferences.

And in fact, concepts from Mac OS X were referenced heavily in the design of Trillian. For example, the Trillian preferences window is based on System Preferences in Mac OS. Even though it has a Windows look in the Windows version currently, the Mac version will spot a Mac look with authentic controls. The design of the skin also has a feel of a 'remote control' in mind, similar to the widgets on Dashboard, or the controls of the Apple DVD Player.

In future, we would hopefully allow the possibility of having other interfaces. While I would love to see a 'normal' OS X window or a minimal black slate window also, the current plan is to develop Cordonata first, which is essentially the superset of these other alternative skins. Those other skins may be beneficial to those who only uses IM on a Mac.

Next up, I'll talk about how Trillian Astra for Mac lives well with its brothers on the Web and on Windows.

Proceed to Part 3...

Think Different: A Lesson in Porting

With the release of the alpha of Trillian Astra for Mac, there are lots of comments and controversies stirred up by the new design of the software. In the following 3-part series, I will attempt to explain the reasoning behind the design and open myself to critiques and comments.

iTunes: a straight port

Apple's Mac OS X is the Mecca of desktop user interface design. Despite how many times Apple itself breaks its own interface guidelines with iTunes, Time Machine or Dashboard, such new experiences are justified by good logic and craftsmanship, no matter how they deviate from the norm.

As we move along in the future of software, I envision that the distinction between downloaded desktop software and web software. And this is how the design challenge began.

Designing between Platforms

Microsoft Office: a culture-specific port

We first saw software from OS X coming to Windows (e.g. iTunes, QuickTime), and software from Windows coming to OS X (e.g. Office), when their user bases were distinct, i.e. Mac users always stay in Mac, Windows users always stay in Windows. That was relatively easy. Windows and Mac OS X could be a metaphor of two different nations with different culture. One could simply translate the software directly into another and call it done, or one could also design the software to be culture-specific. The latter means that, Office for Windows have a Windows layout and Windows features, while Office for Mac have a Mac layout and Mac features.

Adobe Photoshop: an in-between port

And then we also had software that are designed to work on both platforms (e.g. Photoshop). Back in the days, they were mostly professional software. Such software exists as its own entity; their users will be unhappy to relearn the software if they switch OS. Therefore, it is always interesting to look at Adobe and Macromedia products, in the way how they designed the UI to make users of both OS-es happy. In my observation, Adobe is getting more aggressive these days introducing its own UI elements, while still respecting the fonts and metrics of the OS.

And now we have the third type of software: Software that is always connected, across operating systems and across platforms of desktop, web and device.

So here's the challenge: Design a unified interface across all OS platforms, desktop and web, while retaining an identity. This is Trillian Astra.

Admittedly, Trillian Astra is one of the few first software out there that attempts such triumvirate. Here at Trillian, a lot of users use IM across OS-es and devices. For example, one would have a Mac at home, while a Windows PC in the office, and also an iPhone on the run at the same time. There would also be users who have a Windows PC at home, and always on the run in libraries and Internet cafes. The user does not stay at the same platform all the time in these cases, as we encourage them to use Trillian across the board. In this point of view, coherence is not simply between the software and the operating system, but also between the software in these different incarnations.

I would like to start a conversation with any UX designers out there, and I hope we will have a better reach to do this with the release of the Mac edition. Please feel free to drop your comments in.

Next up, I will talk about how Trillian is designed to be coherent with Mac OS X.

Proceed to Part 2...

A Cavallo

It is essential for an artist to get out of his own realm and look for something that will excite him. Taking a break from all the tech talks, here are some of things I am helping out with recently in real life.

I always have a passion for creating an actual object in reality. Back in the days in Hong Kong, I had hardly any access to tools to create my own objects. The only choices are paper and Lego. RISD was heaven to me because I could access all these wonderful tools for creation that I had never seen before: table saws, metal molten casts, and all sorts of carving tools.

After graduation, my access to such machines were gone. My current job as the designer of Trillian is good and challenging, but I hardly have to leave my computer. There wasn't a lot of places for me to work on projects unless I rent my own shop (expensive) or go to an artist colony like 3rd Ward (far).

But, anyway, let's get into the gist of what I had been helping out in free time:

This is "A Cavallo", an art piece designed by Quill Hyde for Burning Man 2007 and beyond. I had been a lot happier since I was working on this project. The exercises involved in the welding, grinding and transportation of steel, the friendly and vibrant work crew (We meet often!), the smooth planning and management by Quill, and of course, the fresh air outside an air-conditioned office, are all refreshing.

The 'machine' is a very well-designed carousel, including a 2nd-level catwalk allowing the control of 6 rhythmic fire torches, a live music stage with custom sculpted speakers, and 6 steel horses circling up and down gracefully. The horses have an interesting origami folded look, that balances nicely between geometry and organic forms. They all have a different character, as portrayed by their surface finishes and a symbol on their heads.

The art piece was prominently shown in Burning Man, as we cruised around the desert every day and night with our wild music and carnival-esque faire. It was well-documented by a lot of participants in the festival, and it was also featured on New York Magazine. But this is not the end! We are trying to find more ways to show the carousel outside Burning Man. A ride in Halloween Parade would be cool, but some city ordinances prevented it from happening...

If you live around New York City and are interested in these wild horses, feel free to stop by our fundraiser in Red Hook next Saturday (Oct 13) night! We are giving out a quarter-sized steel horse in the raffle.

For more information, visit http://www.acavallo.org/!

Kibbles 'n Bits

I whipped up this 'logo' in an hour or two for my friend Ryan in the early early morning. It was a fun exercise and I think the result is great (commercially acceptable and great), and it includes all the cliches you can expect from me for my level of skillz: flat-style Illustrator shapes, nice shadows with transparencies and hue-based color changes, round and nicely-fine-tuned cartoons, and an overuse of stars on top "i"s.

It is also very "2000's indie", in the way that you got: handwriting fonts written by real hand not a computer, Web 2.0-style rounded fonts, ribbons, shape resembling a classic emblem but drawn like a cartoon, and lots of irony featuring animals running around happily in a environmental-friendly cage. Oh, humanity! (Originally I want animals running around with syringes to increase the sense of subtle irony.) My stand towards humans owning pets is ambivalent. I guess animals do want to be our friends, but I guess they think we are dreaming.

Anyway, I should do more time attack exercises like this and I'm glad I took the challenge Ryan gave me. So... now let's start earning some money!

Things Learnt From Making Trillian for iPhone

Phew! The week was quick! The idea of making Trillian work on the iPhone did not come around until two weeks ago, when we are convinced that Trillian Astra may be able to run on the phone.

There are a few engineering challenges concerning the connectivity of a mobile device, and design limits due to the size and processing power of the device. Since the iPhone is designed as a gesamtkunswerk (a total work of art), my main concern is to create a user experience that is as coherent with the iPhone itself as possible, while still retaining a brand identity: something that won't make an iPhone user feel like they are contaminating their dear phone, while keeping Trillian users proud.

Here are some quick things that just come out of my brain in regards of designing applications on iPhone:

1. Ergonomics: After dissecting the iPhone UI, I concluded a very simple rule: Buttons need to be the size of a finger. And it cannot be too close to each other.
2. Metrics: Apple keep sizes of things fairly straightforward, everything is around multiples of 10 pixels, which translates to 1/16 of an inch. A button is usually 40 pixels tall, which is a quarter of an inch.
3. Color: The iPhone interface, in fact, uses very similar hue ranges as Trillian Astra. But then all these are just guessing unless we can actually take screenshots from the phone.
4. Interface Inconsistencies: While reading from the iPhone applications, I realize that their interface is actually not very consistent: Sometimes the bottom is black, sometimes is blue, sometimes it's used as a status bar, sometimes a toolbar. Some screens are black, some screens are white. Nevertheless, it is still pretty tied together because it's intuitive and minimal enough.
5. Font: Apple loves Helvetica on the iPhone. Humanist fonts seem to go out of style when Microsoft begins adopting them in Windows Vista. Surprisingly enough, the phone includes Helvetica's archnemesis, Arial, probably for viewing Google, who is obsessed in the font.
6. CSS Compatibility: Most of the time was spent on getting the perfect CSS. I coded all the HTML using just <DIV>'s for reusability. It was a great experience to code a web page that works for just one browser. Makes you wonder why we should all suffer from browser wars. Safari on iPhone also spots some CSS3 features that other browsers don't have, and I can use them happily with no worries.
7. Testing: You need to have an iPhone to test no matter what. Safari for Windows or Mac may help you verify your stylesheets, but it will not reflect the exact rendering on the iPhone and the way user interacts with the application.

With that said, I have yet to get an iPhone... I know, it's harder to design if I cannot immerse myself into 'knowing' the device I am designing on.

God Forbids if this is the new Trillian Logo

Just kidding. But apparently Adobe thinks so...

If you installed the Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta a few months ago, you probably thinks that it is a temporary icon...

No. This is it!!!

After you upgraded your computer from the 20th-century with Mac OS X or Windows Vista, both equipped with 128x128+ sized icons, all you can get from a creative software is a monolithic square.

This is not to say that I am against Minimalism. It is a noble attempt to integrate the two product lines with tens of products, from Adobe and the original Macromedia, under the same branding strategy.

Remember the older icons from Adobe? While the standard tools from the operating system would describe plainly what they do (e.g. Microsoft Paint is, apparently, a paint brush), the expensive tools are described with an abstract imagery to propose their superiority. For example, the icon of Adobe Photoshop 8 was a flying eye through a camera lens, and it described hardly what the tool does, though the branding designer would argue that the function of the tool is beyond your imagination, thus such imagery. A branded icon is 'sentimental': From the viewpoint of the company it describes their reach to the users, while from the viewpoint of the consumer it describes their pride in what they purchased.

Therefore, the design of the Adobe CS3 icons is so abstract that you cannot even imagine what the function of the tool is, or perhaps, Adobe thinks that it has become part of the human culture itself it will require no further explanation of what the tool does, thus flipping you a semantic two-letter combination. I would say that the ego of the company has grown beyond the level of software developer.

Minimalism is great if it is done like MUJI, which stands for "Good Products Without Branding" in Kanji. Here in the Adobe icons, Minimalism is employed in a totally opposite meaning: Maximum branding. While the minimal designs of MUJI products attempts to blend into your living room with coherent and simple materials, the minimal designs of the Adobe icons forms an uniform army on your desktop, screaming "You have been assimilated by Adobe so I want you to remember us all the time". Both resulted in coherence and clarity, which is the essence of employing Minimalism in a design, but their purposes are completely different.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been working on the famous bug #837 for a while now. That's why we have this icon talk right now. :)

A Screenshot of Trillian Astra (for the Mac and the Web)

This is ecstatic!!

Can you tell which one is in vector and which one is in bitmap? Cordonata is designed in Adobe Illustrator from ground up, so the conversion has been easy. Scale9Grid feature of Flash 8+ played a pivotal role in composing these windows. It took a week or two of experiment, however, to get bitmaps to scale properly in Flash. Since Flash does not support blurring and drop shadows without turning shapes into movieclips, I used a lot of the ancient "Soften Fill Edges" feature to get my way. The feature turns out to be incredibly effective and shaved lots of KBs off the window, ensuring a fast load for our dear new web users.

Although it is internally codenamed "Express", it is not a separate product unlike, e.g. AIM vs AIM Express, but instead a subset of the grand vision umbrella-ed under Trillian Astra. :)

For more information and signing up for testing, the brand new Trillian Astra web site says it all!

Technorati tags: Trillian, Trillian Astra, Web, Flash

"A Celestial and Futuristic Landscape"

...and that was how I described it back then in 2001. The windows are sculpted in a specific shape so that they would line up and create series of choreographed waves going up and down, like rows of mountains... hence the name, "Cordillera".

I had to design the most versatile, sensible and attractive interface. There was a month's time to finish the skin, in order to enter the skinning contest. The design underwent a long scrutiny until the final draft. It was not an easy design:

1. All windows need to be resizable, i.e. it has to look in virtually any size - or at least normal sizes - it is unusual in the realm of design.
2. You can have any amount of windows, and that means it has to look good whether there are sixty flowers or one flower in the vase. Both the design of a flower and the vase are equally important and difficult. The Contact List (or "Main Window" as we called it back then) is the only unique and always visible element, while you can have a variety of Message Windows and Status Windows, and so on.
3. The design challenges above still exist today, but to make more difficult, back then I had limited technology to work with. I could not stretch or do fancy calculations (now you can!). I could only tile. I could not overlay things on top of one and another. Text boxes, contact list areas and display areas must have opaque backgrounds. You couldn't align things at center. Oh, and you couldn't change any fonts either.

After spending a month of summer vacation working on it, the result was a curvy skin in cerulean blue called "Trillian Professional 1.0". It was very well-received, and eventually chosen to be the default skin for the then-future version of Trillian "0.64". It was a great feeling back then to have my work recognized, and also the first time working with strangers over the Internet. I had won a few awards back in high school on designing computer programs for education purposes, but then nothing really happened in college ever since until a few years, so that came as a little surprise. It was pretty exciting back then.

Months of refinement and collaboration led to a total redraw of the skin, soon widely known as "Trillian Cordillera". Along with the release of a brand new 0.70 version of Trillian that featured file transfer, the software was propelled into stardom within days, gaining momentum and attention from media and enemies alike. Trillian became very popular and eventually its image landed on the cover of PC Magazine and the pages of Wired Magazine and more.

Of course, success was not without price. A few months later, while Trillian was blocked by AOL, Cordillera was also ripped and copied by other skinners in the forum and from other softwares. It took me very long to accept such harsh reality, and realized that it was actually no threat to me since rippers and imitators are always people who are much less talented. But of course, I didn't know that, and instead, I wasted too much time on defending the skin being ripped off, and eventually became uninterested.

That also was probably the dark ages of the world of Trillian skinning. To push for a professional image, we decided to use Whistler as the default skin for Trillian Pro 1.0, since the other choice "Trillian Cordonata" (a totally different Cordonata than the one you see now) was not good enough. And so we neglected the fluid forms of Cordillera, and were stuck with the corporate rectangle for good four years.

During that period of time, I had designed "Trillian Cordillera 03" and "Trillian Cordillera 2004", but neither of them got released, because it required a lot of time and it had limited audience. I also designed for a lot of things that required better skinning technology that I always expected to be included in the next version but they never made it. And so, we were stuck in the middle ages with Whistler.

Trillian Astra project changed everything. With the introduction of Profile+Widgets, Trillian Astra is geared more towards a crowd who likes to express themselves, and as a result, a more expressive skin is required in order to attract such a crowd. The versatile and elegant design of "Trillian Cordonata" made its debut, with a nice balance between the pragmatic Whistler and joyful Cordillera. But the nicer thing is, developing Cordonata results a great by-product: better skinning technologies that we had been looking for since 2001.

So here we are. With much better vector rendering skills and expertise, and with the use of Trillian Astra's new technologies for alpha-transparent windows, bitmap stretching, PNG layering, skinnable contact list area, color themes and a lot more, let's welcome the new "Trillian Cordillera Astreme", a total redraw, rethinking and redesign, a triumphant rebirth of the classic. Though she had now surrendered its crown as the default skin to Cordonata, she remains a shining jewel that we will love. And I hope you'll like it too.

What's more, it is not just a screenshot. It is available for download already. Of course, you need to be a tester in order to use it. Enjoy!

Have a very Merry Christmas to everyone!!!