We Made This

Drop Caps

Ah, now this is just type geekery gone bonkers.

Kern is the new iPhone game from FORMation, who are an "alliance of independent creators" based in Texas.

The game involves moving a letter along a base line so that it's in exactly the right spot to fit into the word that's dropping down onto it from above. And that's pretty much it. But it's been designed by Jason Franzen with a typographer's keen attention to detail, and it only costs 59p, so even if you only play it a few times (most likely in the pub when you're trying to outgeek some other type nut), it's hardly breaking the bank.

Ridiculous yet essential.

Thanks to Catherine Dixon for the heads up.

iPhone camera app goodness

So, for most designers, the iPhone is the mobile of choice. But for most of those designers, the phone's camera is, well, rubbish: just 2 megapixels, and a cruddy lens to boot.

But, help has arrived in the form of a couple of deeply tasty downloadable apps that let you process your shots on the phone. We've secured the services of two 'resting' members of top pop combo Gorillaz (2D and Murdoc) to demonstrate those apps.

First up is 2D and the delicious QuadCamera from Art&Mobile. This application lets you fire off a salvo of shots, just like you might with a Lomo Super Sampler toy camera. Utterly brilliant. You can adjust how fast they shoot; which layout they come in (a rectangle of four, four in a row, a rectangle of eight, or eight in a row); and whether they're colour or greyscale.

We've pushed the colour/contrast on the shots above (using Photoshop), but even without doing that, they look great.

Fantastically, once you've got them on your computer, you can download the free QuadAnimator application to create gif animations of your shots. Eat your heart out Michel Gondry. Can't wait to see the first promo shot like this...

Next up is Nevercenter's CameraBag app, which lets you apply some groovy filters to your shots, re-creating a whole variety of retro styles like Holga, Fisheye, and Lomo. (We're guessing there's some kind of copyright reason for them renaming Holga to Helga and Lomo to Lolo). It's still a bit buggy, but generally does great stuff. Here's a selection of shots of Murdoc using some of our favourites.

First up, the original shot:

Now, the Instant (Polaroid) version:

 

And the 1962 version:

And the Lolo version:

And finally, the Helga:

Lush eh? Check out the full size shots over at Alistair's iPhone Flickr set.

Thanks to 2D and Murdoc.

Clothing: Models' own

Styling, hair and makeup: Jamie Hewlett

FontShuffle

The rather tasty little iPhone application FontShuffle has just hit town, courtesy of the folks at FontShop.

The app lets you browse through a selection of Font categories (sans serif, serif, slab serif, script, blackletter and display), and then to pick from a list of relevant sub-categories (so serif would take you to grotesque, humanist, geometric, gothic, decorative and hybrid), and then to a list of six of FontShop's available faces. Then, and this is oddly fun*, if you want to see a further six faces, you give the iPhone (or iTouch) a shake, and a new set pop up.

Select one of the typefaces and you'll get The Quick Brown Fox text in that face, swivel the screen to the landscape mode and you'll get the glyph chart.

This is the first version of the app, and at the moment it's just a friendly little marketing tool for FontShop, without any hugely practical uses. But they're promising to add more faces, and more functionality, so it could go somewhere very interesting. 

Cheers to Caspian for the heads up.

*If, like us, you don't get out much.

iPhone Wallpaper goodness

If you've got an iPhone (and if you're a designer, there's a 74.3% probability that you do have one), you'll be wanting it to look super lovely at all times. So how about some tasty'n'free wallpaper for it?

We've been playing around creating a series of wallpapers of our own (that's a few of them shown above), and you can check out the full collection on our Flickr set.

You might also want to take a look at the lovely Poolga site, which collects wallpapers from designers and illustrators all over the world for your viewing and downloading pleasure.

And the ever brilliant type and image library Veer have got a fine collection too.

We're guessing there must be stacks more out there, so if you know of any, or have some killer ones of your own, drop us a link in the comments.

Sharing is good.

We Made This on your iPhone

So, the Cupertino kids have been getting busy again, with Apple launching a raft of shiny new tech goodness on Tuesday afternoon. You can watch Steve Jobs wowing the fanboys on this film of his keynote speech.

They've launched a super slim laptop, a new and improved version of Apple's set top box for renting movies directly to your TV, added Mail and Maps to the iPod Touch, added movie rentals on iTunes, and also launched Time Capsule, a new external hard drive which plays nicely with the latest version of OS X.

We were most happy to see the updated iPhone firmware (v.1.1.3), which means that you can now customise the home screen on your iPhone. About time really. You can now ditch the applications you don't use (or at least slide them across to a second home screen), and create icons for your favourite web pages.

Usually when you do this, you just get a screengrab of whichever webpage you're bookmarking (like The Guardian one in the picture above), but brilliantly, Typepad, who host our blog, have also made it possible for bloggers to create customised icons for their blog, so that you get a proper smart'n'shiny icon.

So, if you're an iPhone user and a We Made This reader, you can go ahead and stick us on your homescreen without worrying about it looking all messy. Hoorah for tech goodness!

Apple iPhone - announced

Oh yes indeedy.

Apple have finally announced the iPhone, which we were getting all excited about on here back in October; and it looks like a barnstorming piece of kit, combining touch-screen iPod, iPhone, web browser, and push e-mail (like a Blackberry, innit). Dreamy.

It's not hitting the UK till the end of the year, after launching in the USA this summer. We're hoping that'll just mean they've ironed out all the inevitable kinks before it gets here.

Check out the blow by blow account of Steve Jobs' speech, with lots of great pics, here.

Oh, and, they've got a new TV device too, Apple TV.

Not a bad morning's work from the Cupertino kids eh?

Apple iPhone

Rumours of an Apple mobile phone have been bubbling around the interweb for a few years now, and every time Steve Jobs gets up to make a keynote speech at one of the Apple Expos, the blogosphere gets even more crazy in anticipation of the phone's launch. The latest 'top secret leak' is putting the release at somewhere round January / February 2007.

Loads of concept designs have been put together by aspiring designers / apple geeks, and this site (featured on Core 77) has a great collection of the various visuals, though unfortunately with little information about the designers of each one.

The fantastic shot above, for example, was commissioned for the cover of our favourite Apple Mac magazine, MacUser.

We're still hoping for an Apple mobile, mainly so we can finally have a decent looking phone that syncs up properly with our Macs.

So, if it's not too geeky (okay, it's totally too geeky, but whatever), here's a list of what we'd like to see on an Apple iPhone:

• A 3 megapixel camera (at least, bigger if possible), with movie recording too
• Full sync capabilities with the Mac native applications that make our life easier: Mail, Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, Address Book and Calendar
• Push email capabilities, like you get with a blackberry
• Caller ID, using full screen shots of callers
• Wireless headphones
• Some decent ringtones - surely an area Apple can forge ahead of other companies
• A stack of storage space for our music libraries, and the chance to plug in even more
• A GPS based system that lets you know when your friends & family are nearby
• A charger that doesn't use power while not in use

Mobile phones are a key part of our lives now, but they never quite seem to work the way we want. Either the user interface is confusing or slow, or the visual design is grim. Another big problem is people buying new handsets every year, which is an environmental insanity. How about a handset that lasts for years and years, but with regular software updates which you pay for? The phone could be sold universally in a basic mode, but then upgraded to your personal needs by installing the applications you want. Hey, a bit like a computer...

Apple have a chance to totally rethink things, and create something brilliant. Let's hope they can do something truly innovative.