darrenbeckett - something i've been working on

10.02.08mon

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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10.02.04thu

Apple Portables

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10.02.01mon

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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10.01.29fri

Does the iPad Cost Too Much?

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10.01.24sun

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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10.01.23sat

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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10.01.21thu

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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