All this icons are examples of excellent iPhone app icon design, more can be found on this article. I really want to create my own icon for the Quick Reader app and to show it in use on an iPhone screen.
Beautiful App Icon Designs
Photoshop UI Textures
I've been looking at this tutorial for creating texture in Photoshop as I want to implement this in my Quick Reader design. It adds some realism to apps that makes them feel more tangible.
App Sites
I've been using this excellent website that collects app showcase websites to find inspiration for the Quick Reader site design.
App Promotional Website Context
Here are some screenshots of app promotional websites that are informing my own designs, my favourite is the iA website because of it's clean simplicity:
Angry Birds - Space Animation
The Angry Birds francise is hugely popular, but a less-known fact is that it was basically a copy of various other flash games found around the internet. The developers of Angry Birds basically created a brand around their game with an accompanying storyline and combined this with excellent customer support that listens to their users and updates the game accordingly.
The animated video above is an example of this story, that is created alongside the games they release. This particular video is an introduction their new version of the game 'Angry Birds Space' and will even be broadcast on the popular children's TV channel Nickelodeon (very, very smart move!). I think that this kind of brand identity/narrative can be invaluable towards the success of an app, especially in the crowded and continuously expanding virtual app marketplace.
Rechner - Gestural Touch Calculator
The Rechner app for iPhone is a simple calculator where the operations are chosen using touch gestures. I think that although it won't make much difference to the speed of using the calculator it would be more enjoyable and 'tactile' for the user.
I also like their simple visuals for explaining the different gestures available, I need to start looking at more visual ways to communicate the functionality of my own app designs:
Reeder
Reeder is a multi-platform app that is in some ways similar to Flipboard, but perhaps better suited to longer text-heavy content. It is more closely connected to the Google Reader service and could be described as an interface for it, since all of the user's content feeds and most of Google Reader's features can be used within the app.
The app also connects to other services thought like Twitter and Read it Later which is good, as it adds more functionality to the basic Google Reader service.
Longreads - Time to Read Information
Longreads is a site dedicated to promoting long-form journalistic articles. One aspect I love about the site is the face that is lets the user know how much time an article will take to read by looking at its word length against the average reading speed.
This idea of letting the user know how much time will be needed to consume the content is very valuable in modern western society as time is quickly becoming a rare commodity.
Flipboard is an excellent mobile app that aggregates content from many different sources including rss feeds, social networks and also special feeds curated by the Flipboard team. The result is a 'personal magazine' of content that is always personally relevant to the user.
I think my BLYK app will combine the idea of personally relevant information with the idea of delivering bitesize amounts of reading content. I aim to propose a system that delivers highly relevant and consumable content on a daily basis, allowing the user to control the amount and length of the information presented.
BERG: Little Printer
Little Printer is a new product being released by the interactive design company BERG. The printer will work in tandem with an mobile app and 'cloud' data services to produce printed content pulled from different online sources.
Fundamentally it is a traditional ticket/receipt printer empowered with web technology to print useful content for the user. This content could include anything from personal agenda's up-to-date world news or daily puzzels.
The essence of this accessible and easy-to-read information delivery system is something I want to capture in my own designs for a daily information app.