…as we have a date! The Icon Handbook will be available to pre-order on December 20th!

More details will be released shortly, but the Five Simple Steps page has an introduction and table of contents to give you a flavour.

Tagged: iconhandbook, icons

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There is nothing worse than pulling up to an unknown cafe while out on a ride to find they offer poor coffee and stale cake

Patisserie Cyclisme, is THE source of cycling café reviews and they have a rather spiffingly hypnotic new logo!

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I’ve written my first book!

Its taken even more time and energy than I ever dreamed it would, but yesterday marked the very last chapter passing it’s final stages of being buffed and tweaked into a manuscript that people would actually want to read.

I started planning this book 5 years ago, and only the combination of Five Simple Steps, Chris Mills (A.K.A “Mills of Steel”), Owen Gregory and my technical editor, Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory has made it actually happen.

All the icon artists I contacted (bar one – but I shan’t name any names!) were enthusiastic and responsive, which made it a joy to organise. Many responses came with fantastic icon material that hasn’t been seen before – early ideas and process snapshots, as well some yet to be released.

More details of the book will follow soon, but for now, here’s a work in progress of the cover to (hopefully) whet your appetite!

Tagged: iconhandbook, icons

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We’re having a truly Indian Summer here in the UK, and it looks set to continue over the weekend. It gets dark by 7pm at this time of year, so I had to get out early tonight to enjoy the warm rays while they lasted.

This image sums it up for me – riding through pretty countryside, with long shadows and village names that make giggle like a schoolboy.

Tagged: cotswolds, cycling

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As the Apple TV doesn’t let you connect a drive directly with your content (it requires a ‘middle man’ of iTunes) getting your content to show up can be a little trying at times. Some of the reasons why it goes wrong are:

1. The Mac serving the content isn’t on
2. The Mac serving the content has dropped off the wifi network (happening a lot in Lion)
3. The Mac serving the content doesn’t have iTunes open
4. The Mac serving the content has iTunes open, but Home Sharing isn’t turned on (or using the same login as the one specified on Apple TV)
5. The drive where all the content is stored has become unmounted, so iTunes can’t access it
6. You’ve remounted the drive, but there’s a bug where if iTunes has tried to play content stored on the network drive, it corrupts the file path data, replacing it with some other obscure file (in my case, it seems to be a photo folder bizarrely)

In short, there’s too much to go wrong, and Apple TV is on the naughty step until these steps can be bypassed without hacks. Rant over.

Tagged: appletv, mediacentre

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Most people think that the opposite of play is work (especially in the corporate world) but the opposite is boredom or even depression.

Great article about the design consultancy IDEO, and how they use a culture of play to support creativity.

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I’ve been following the announcements of the new Windows 8 UI (and particularly ‘Metro’) this week with great interest. I think they’ve done a fantastic job with Metro, it really looks like a fresh start UI wise.

One detail stood out in particular. In the screenshots I noticed that they’ve adopted the Open Share Icon in their UI.

To fill you in, the Open Share Icon came about after the original share icon was purchased by the company that provides the ShareThis service. While still licensed for public use, some people felt this wasn’t in the spirit of the thing, and decided to create a completely open version instead. It’s this version that Microsoft has adopted.

So why is this newsworthy? Microsoft did the same back in 2005, when they adopted the RSS icon that Stephen Horlander created for Firefox 1.0. That adoption quickly established it as a standard, and standards are good for everyone. Before long we will think of share as this symbol, without thinking twice.

Tagged: icons, microsoft

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Here’s an interesting idea for improving bike lights and night time visibility. Revolights is a Kickstarter Project that places LEDs in a ring around the wheel, timed so that it provides a constant beam lower down, lighting up the road around you:

From the video, I’m not 100% convinced that they’re quite bright enough yet, but to be honest, I adore the effect. Tron light cycle comparisons aside, I’m just a fan of how they look when moving. I really hope this project gets some attention, funding and development – in a few years this might be the kind of thing that gets built into the wheel itself.

Tagged: cycling, inventions

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James Styring, an Oxford-based cyclist and cycling campaigner (he runs Cyclox), wrote about my conversion to cycling in his column for the Oxford Mail. Thanks James!

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Safari Omnibar is a SIMBL plugin for Safari that enables a single addressfield/search bar like Google Chrome’s Omnibox. Its still fairly early days, but it works well, and has just been updated to support search shortcuts:

(the search bar is hidden after installation)

To edit keyword searches, right click the address field…

… and then you can then enter the search keywords

This is of course functionality that’s been available in Opera and Firefox, long before Chrome, but this is a great way for folks that prefer Safari to get it.

Safari Omnibar is hosted on github

Tagged: plugins, safari

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