Max Themes Blog

Feb 4

jennysunden:

Store Marketing material for Vegetarisk Husmanskost
Yesterday I printed those mini posters at ABA close to Nytorget on Söder, Stockholm. Some of them got nice frames. I put up 7 or 8 posters around Söder, in the nice Goodstore on Skånegatan 92, Cajsa Warg (where I also bought some good cheese, coconut oil and lemon oil) and the vegetarian restaurant Chutney among others. Now I’m out asking at some nice lunch places in the City center, where I used to work.

Store Marketing material for Vegetarisk Husmanskost

Yesterday I printed those mini posters at ABA close to Nytorget on Söder, Stockholm. Some of them got nice frames. I put up 7 or 8 posters around Söder, in the nice Goodstore on Skånegatan 92, Cajsa Warg (where I also bought some good cheese, coconut oil and lemon oil) and the vegetarian restaurant Chutney among others. Now I’m out asking at some nice lunch places in the City center, where I used to work.

Feb 1

“

Here’s another recipe app for iPad that has me drooling for two reasons — delicious dishes and delicious pixels.

[…]

Filibaba (funky name, guys) has now come out with the Veggie Meals app for iPad that brings you 55 different easy to cook meals and their recipes. These recipes come along with some stunning pictures of the dishes, so it’s a beautiful sight to look at.

” Beautiful Pixels

Jan 31

Veggie Meals – 55 easy to cook meals – Now on iPad

I’m really excited to finally write about Veggie Meals – the first app where we have done everything from content to design and release.

Veggie Meals contains 55 easy to cook vegetarian and vegan meals. They are an excellent source of proteins made from common ingredients. The app is available in English & Swedish and you can easily switch between metric or US measurements, Celsius or Fahrenheit. It works in both portrait and landscape so you can choose whichever orientation you prefer.

We have lots of new features planned going forwards with Veggie Meal, but we want to hear from you if there are improvements or things you’d especially like us to add.

The idea for the app comes from my girlfriend Jenny Sundén (@jensu). She grew up in a family with a long tradition of vegetarian cooking and her brother Viktor have previously made a printed cookbook with their family recipes. It proved quite popular and they sold all of the thousand copies they made. Veggie Meals is the result from Jenny’s idea to make an iPad app based on the printed book.

During one week last summer they cooked and reshot the 55 vegetarian and vegan recipes with the help of their friend Anna-Maria Will, a professional photographer. I also helped out – with the eating part. They bought some new cloths and cutting-boards for the reshoot, and they worked as inspiration for the graphical style of the app.

The app was long in limbo as we struggled to find someone to help us program it. Luckily, a cry for help via Twitter landed us talented developer Robert Dougan (@rdougan). Robert, besides having an awesome irish accent, has become an equally awesome iOS developer.

We’re now all part of the newly founded company Filibaba.

iPad as a cookbook

I sincerely believe the iPad is the future of computing for the common user. For those who mostly consume content, there are mostly upside to having an iPad compared to a traditional PC or a laptop. It’s more portable, more durable, easier to use and easy to maintain. And tablets are exploding in popularity, 19% of American adults now own a tablet and the tablet shipments to reach 383.3 million by 2017.

With it’s increasing popularity, it’s finding new areas of use. You wouldn’t lend a laptop to your child, but an iPad is not a problem. Similarly, you’d think twice about bringing your laptop into the kitchen for when cooking.

Therefore a cookbook feels like a great application for the iPad. We hope you’ll agree with us after trying Veggie Meals. And even if you’re not a vegetarian, these recipes are easy to cook even if you only make them once in a while.

If you want to write about Veggie Meals, don’t hesitate to contact hello@filibaba.com and we’ll gladly answer any questions you have and provide you with material. We have press images available on Filbaba’s Flickr.

So what are you waiting for – hop on App Store and buy it!

Dec 5

I use the multitasking drawer a lot. So much that the double tap of the home button is no longer cutting it. It feels slow and interrupts my flow when using the device.

To make matters worse, the home button on my iPhone is no longer as responsive as it should be. A double tap is often interpreted as a single tap which means that instead of showing the multitasking drawer it either closes the app, or if I’m already on the home screen it takes me to the search page.

A simple gesture would decrease the wear and tear of the hardware button, and also speed up the usage of the multitasking drawer. You simply start dragging from outside the bottom of the screen and move your finger onto the screen. This edge swipe would activate the multitasking drawer.

This could be an optional setting, in the same way that Apple has made the iPad gestures optional. Certain apps might have a conflicting gesture, or a novice user might activate it accidentally. So the default behavior should probably be to have this turned off.

Oct 27

Nice wallpaper by Piotr Karwowski. Get it on his deviantART page.

Oct 13

Haven’t you heard about the bird?

Had a moment of inspiration last evening and made a small alteration to the Twitter icon in the Max Themes header. Switch back to http://www.maxthemes.com/ and try and spot a little human touch to an otherwise minimalistic navigation!

Oct 9

Added another variant of the Steve Jobs wallpaper

I got some feedback that the Steve wallpaper was too dark and icon clutter would cover his face. So I’ve made a variant where he is situated on the left side of the screen, with more curtain showing.

You can download the three variants here.

Update: Now there is also a mobile version.

Obsidian Menu Bar & 10.7.2

I finally took the time to install the 10.7.2 beta to see how will Obsidian Menu Bar works under it. Installing 10.7.2 over a previous version with Obsidian installed works. But you’ll end up with the default gray menubar and the gray menu text and icons from Obsidian.

Unfortunately at this time I was not able to update the installer to work under 10.7.2. I use SArtFileTool, and it currently doesn’t behave as expected under the new system update. I will have to wait for an update to this tool before I can update the installer.

I have however updated the Restore OS X Menu Bar to function under 10.7.2. This means that if you forgot to restore to the default menu bar before upgrading to 10.7.2, you can at least restore the menu text and icons to their default.

The restore package is part of the Obsidian installer and can be downloaded here.

Jul 26

Great application of Obsidian Menu Bar and Etched icons! Posted by dantesieg on MacThemes forum

Jul 23

White clock for OSX, an app made to go with Obsidian Menu Bar

Jun 11

iOS 5 Notification Center Fall Down Transition

My tweak is a change to the transition that takes you to the Notification Center. Swiping down from the menubar makes the interface fall to the bottom of the screen, revealing the notifications in the background. To leave the notifications, you tap the interface at the bottom of the screen.

There has been a number of redesigns of the Notification Center after Apple revealed it in the WWDC keynote. Most change the linen texture into something else. I think the texture could be toned down a bit, but my gripe is that the linen texture is used inconsistently.

The linen texture has been used to denote that something is at the very bottom layer of the interface. For example, when you open a folder, the wallpaper separates to reveal the folder contents on a linen texture.

Therefore, the Notification Center that slides out above the interface shouldn’t really use the linen texture.

Apr 15

Why touch screens could still come to the Mac

There’s a misconception in the Mac community that multitouch capable screens will never come to the Mac. This is due to a statement made by Steve Jobs in the Back to the Mac event where Apple revealed Mac OS X Lion.

But what did he really say? I made a transcript of his keynote speech:

The first thing you think about is this [shows the above image of the hand pointing at a MBP screen]. We thought about this years ago. We’ve done tons of user testing on this. And it turns out it doesn’t work.

Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue. And after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work. It’s ergonomically terrible.

Touch surfaces wants to be horizontal - hence, pads! For notebooks, that’s why we have perfected our multitouch trackpads over the years. Because that’s the best way we found, to get multitouch into a notebook.

We’ve also in essence put a multitouch trackpad on the mouse, with our Magic mouse. And we’ve recently come out with a peripheral trackpad as well, for our desktop users. So this is how we are going to use multitouch on our mac products. Because this [points forward] doesn’t work.

- Steve Jobs

So in essence, multitouch needs to be a horizontal surface, because vertical multitouch causes fatigue and doesn’t work. And their current solution are trackpads and mice.

So what about a Mac with a horizontal surface?

This patent shows an iMac with a flex base that would let the screen pivot backwards. Such a Mac could have multitouch without contradicting anything that Steve said, since the touch surface is horizontal.

The final piece of the puzzle would be Mac OS X Lion. Many of the built-in apps such as iPhoto, iCal and Mail have a full-screen state that lets each app occupy its own dedicated space. The difference from Snow Leopard is that spaces in Lion are laid out horizontally. To switch between them, the default behavior is to swipe left or right with four fingers. Sound familiar? Yep, just like the gesture Apple tried out for iPads in iOS 4.3.

The full-screen state could make a great touch screen mode for apps, because they are essentially like large iPad apps. iPhoto is a prime example, since it mirrors all the features of the regular iPhoto, but in a touch-friendly manner. It even has an iOS-like bottom tab bar.

Launchpad is an other key feature for a touch-friendly Mac. What better way to launch your apps than something that looks and behave just like the iOS home screen?

Perhaps this touch screen Mac could automatically bring you to the fullscreen state of the current app as you pivot it backwards, or bring you to Launchpad if the current app doesn’t support touch.

We’ve already seen a number of Mac apps from third party developers that are basically touch-friendly, such as Reeder and Sparrow. And the Mac is increasingly influenced by its iOS siblings, as demonstrated by Mac OS X Lion. I would be surprised if Apple doesn’t eventually borrow the biggest innovation made in iOS - multitouch- and bring it back to the Mac.

Ps. If you want “a great demo” of what not to do, watch this Asus All-in-one video.

Apr 7

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Broken iOS icons

mrgan:

Something is rotten in the state of iOS icons. More and more, I’ve been noticing app icons with good ideas behind them, pretty solid execution for the most part, and one hair-raising screwup practically designed to get the goats of oversensitive designers such as myself. These are some apps I just…

Feb 17

If a phone were to be designed with an edge-to-edge screen, it would lack a hardware home button on the front. Therefore it would require a new way to go to the Home screen. Advanced gestures often requires two hands, which is not optimal for such a frequently used feature.

A more intuitive way could be to equip the phone with a pressure-sensitive body. The phone could then be squeezed and the current app would shrink and return the user to the Home screen.

This could be a real wow effect. Seeing how the phone reacts to your grip and then having the app vanish in the palm of your hand.

To avoid ‘squeeze to go Home’ from happening by accident, a visual cue could show that pressure is being applied. In this concept, the app begins to shrink to reflect the pressure that is being applied. When the pressure goes over a defined threshold, the user is returned to the Home screen.

The strength of a users grip will of course vary. Therefore, a setting for how much pressure that’s needed before an app is exited could be a good idea.

Feb 10

Inspiration

Needless to say, we all get inspired by things we encounter in our daily lives. Sometimes though, similarities are so striking it’s scary.

Above is a picture I grabbed from this Engadget article showing off the just announced HP Pre 3 & TouchPad. Below is a photo I just snapped of my iPhone & iPad, using the Candybars wallpaper from my website.

Boo!