Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ obsessive focus on design detail is at least partially responsible for why the tech sphere and the design sphere are so intertwined at the moment. Which makes the ire that Jobs has received for the current iTunes 10 logo (not to mention the foibles of Ping) particularly poignant. The universal hatred for this thing has spawned an @BPGlobalPR-esque Twitter account, some pretty impressive suggestions of alternate logos over on design collaboration site Dribbble, and an email to Jobs himself.

ValuLeads designer Joshua Kopac:

Enjoyed the presentation today. But … this new iTunes logo really sucks. You’re taking 10+ years of instant product recognition and replacing it with an unknown. Let’s both cross our fingers on this….

Steve Jobs to designer Joshua Kopac:

We disagree.

Sent from my iPhone

Attention Joshua Kopac, Steve Jobs has been reinventing the design landscape since before you were using Mac Paint. HE TOOK A FONT CLASS AT REED FOR CHRISSAKES.

But yeah, people love to backseat graphic design among other things, so I’ll tell you what, anyone who thinks that they can do a better job at logo design than Jobs, Jony Ive and team is welcome to have at it. Just send your submissions to tips@techcrunch, with subject line: “I am better than Steve Jobs” or something more clever and I’ll link to and post the best ones here.

Because I for one find the more “Metal” iTunes 10 logo kind of cool and I’m sure our readers, nerds that they are, could do way better.

Side note: How much do you think sending that “Sent from my iPhone” notification pleases Steve Jobs? I’m willing to bet a heckuva a lot. I’m almost surprised Jobs doesn’t include a * after the “my” as in, *”I designed it, bitch.”

Image: Rich Hemsley

Hate The iTunes 10 Icon? Think You Can Do Better?

On Saturday, I attended WISH 2010 in Tokyo (where I live) to see a total of 15 Japanese startups presenting their services onstage to a panel of judges and an audience of 550 people. The event was organized by online marketing company Agile Media Network (“Japan’s Federated Media“).

Eight of the companies won prizes from various national media (i.e. TechCrunch Japan), and there was one big winner (an e-book publishing platform called Puboo). But here are thumbnail sketches of all of the companies that presented at WISH 2010. (Please note that not all of these services are available in English.)

WISH 2010: Winners

Puboo (Winner: Grand Prix and Mainichi.jp Award)
Puboo is a free e-book publishing service provided by major Japanese book review community Booklog (which currently counts more than 300,000 members). Launched in late June, Puboo has so far allowed individuals to publish 3,000 books (one example) through its interface. The books can be published on Booklog, as PDFs, or in EPUB format (and can be read on the iPad or the Kindle as well).

Conyac (available in English / Winner: TechCrunch Japan Award)
Conyac is a social translation service that requires “requesters” to pay a certain fee upfront, upload a text (or image of a text) and indicate which languages the text should be translated into. Registered translators accept texts they think they can handle to earn “Conyac points”, a virtual currency. Those points can then be converted into real money via Paypal, with the service itself getting a 20% cut. Prices start at $0.3 per letter.

Cacoo (available in English / Winner: Impress Watch Award)
Cacoo is a free online drawing tool that allows multiple users to create diagrams and other graphics (wireframes, software design diagrams, network diagrams, UMLs etc.) collaboratively and in real-time. We covered the entirely browser-based tool (which now boasts 55,000 users worldwide) in more detail here.

Orihime (Winner: Open Network Lab Award)
Orihime is an online shop set up by a female college student who sells self-designed and made-in-Japan PC bags and accessories on the site. The shop encourages buyers to take part in the design and production process by leaving comments and wishes for future products on the site.

Calil (Winner: Asahi.com Award)
Calil is a vertical search engine that lets users find books in over 5,000 public, university and special interest libraries in Japan. The service also provides rankings of the most popular books in those libraries, shows them facilities in their vicinity, lets users create lists of books they plan to borrow and alerts them once they become available.

Garapon TV (Winner: Agile Media Network Award)
Garapon TV is a video recording service that lets users record and store TV programs in the cloud (“on all channels, 7 days a week”). All recorded programs can be watched anytime later on Internet-enabled devices, including the iPhone, iPad or Android phones (3GS demo video). Programs can be tagged, searched and recommended to other Garapon users.

Togetter (Winner: TechWave Award)
Launched a year ago, Twitter-based content aggregation and communication platform Togetter currently boasts over one million unique visitors and nearly five million page views per month, according to creator Yoshida. Togetter lets users submit comments to a certain topic through tweets, pulls relevant tweets into a dedicated page on Togetter and sorts them in a thread. On the page, users can further discuss the topic, contribute tags or add the page to their favorites or bookmarks (example page for a discussion thread on WISH 2010).

Cerevo (Winner: Nikkei Award)
Hardware startup Cerevo is best known for its social camera Cerevo CAM live!, the world’s first digital camera with Ustream live streaming capability (currently sold in Japan only). AT WISH 2010, the company introduced the Cerevo Ustream Box, a small battery-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled device that makes any camera Ustream-compatible (without using a PC). The box (pictured below) will go on sale in Japan this fall.

WiSH 2010: The best of the rest

AQUSH (information in English)
Launched by Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation in December last year, AQUSH is a peer-to-peer lending service that is similar to ZOPA in the UK. Lenders set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. AQUSH loan applicants are screened based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores.

Loctouch
Loctouch is a Foursquare-like LBS application that’s available for the iPhone and Japanese feature phones. Launched by major web portal Livedoor six week ago, Loctouch lets users “touch” spots to indicate their location, recommend interesting places to others and earn badges over time (called “stickers”). Here‘s the web view of a burger restaurant someone “touched” in Tokyo.

Tabereko
Tabereko for the iPhone aggregates information from printed Japanese “gourmet magazines”. Thanks to Google Maps integration, users can not only access the digitized contents but also find stores in their vicinity. Tabereko itself is free but monetizes via in-app purchases.

Lifepalette
Lifepalette is a health-oriented social network. The idea is to help users connect with others through writing diaries on the site, sharing news, asking and answering questions etc. (here‘s an example for a typical diary entry).

Twitnovels (available in English)
Twitnovels is a Twitter-based community for “crowdsourced” novels that launched last month. Users can begin writing a novel and let others continue the story line from any point to create group-edited works (here‘s an example of a Japanese novel in the making by 14 different authors). More information on Twitnovels can be found here.

Decomoji
Decomoji is a Japanese “web font service” for FireFox, IE, Safari, and Chrome. Web site owners can choose between 250 CSS3 fonts for a monthly fee (there’s also a free trial version).

TwiTraq
Launched last month, Twitter analysis tool TwiTraq currently boasts 27,000 users. Twitraq can be used for “self-analysis” (i.e. how often did I tweet in the last days, which hash tags and keywords do I and my followers use most often, etc.), visualizing data in a number of ways (all data can be downloaded as CSV files). The free tool also provides insight about other TwiTraq users, for example by breaking down when, by whom and where tweets about a certain keyword were posted (this page shows the results for keyword “golf”).

From the 15 participating companies, ten were pre-selected, while five (TwiTraq, Conyac, Twitnovels, Tabereko, and Togetter) were voted in by users. For completeness, click here for a list (in English) of the 27 startups that didn’t make the cut.

From WISH 2010 In Tokyo: 15 Japanese Startups Demo Their Services

IPS Resources – New Skin Release: Ogenzen

Matt’s Blog – Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

IPS Resources – Introducing Covenant

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The technology has been in testing for a year, primarily with educational organizations, and may well be a boon for the Android ecosystem as students are introduced to the platform in the classroom. A report in the New York Times quotes project lead (and MIT professor) Harold Abelson as saying “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world… but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.” So does this mean Android’s millions of users are about to start programming for their own devices? Not quite.

I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I’m very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for “ordinary people”. Unless you’re looking to make an extremely basic application — think “Hello World” — you’re going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won’t be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it’s been tested in. The learning curve is not trivial, but this isn’t something that will take years to master, either.

Before I relay my experience, it’s worth giving a little context regarding my own programming background (or lack thereof). In high school I took a year of Visual Basic, which App Inventor reminds me of in a few ways, and I later took a couple of classes on C++, which hasn’t come into play at all here. I’ve never used Scratch, which App Inventor shares many similarities with. I’d consider myself far less experienced than any professional developer, but I’m probably more knowledgeable than your average Android user.

Getting started on App Inventor is easy relative to installing Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it’s still a bit involved. First you need to ensure that you’ve got the proper version of Java running; next, you install a client for your OS; then you have to change a few settings on your Android phone (allow for applications installed from Unknown Sources, enable Dev mode on the phone, etc.). Plug in the phone, log-in to App Inventor, allow the Java app to run, and you should be good to go. It may sound like a lot, but the whole process won’t take more than ten minutes if you know what you’re doing.

Once you’re off and running, you’ll find that App Inventor is broken into two parts: the Designer and the Blocks Editor. The documentation does a good job explaining the differences, but the gist is that you add components like buttons and text fields and adjust the layout of your application in the Designer (which is a web page), and do the actual drag-and-drop coding in the Blocks Editor (which is a Java app). You can deploy changes to your Android device, hooked to your computer via USB, in less than a minute.

My first (admittedly overambitious) idea was to create an application that would allow a user to monitor TechCrunch headlines for keywords, which could come in handy if a startup wanted to get notified whenever we wrote a post about them. The basic layout was easy enough — I dragged a text box, a label, and a button to the design canvas, then tweaked the width and layout settings to make it look slightly less ugly. Then came the hard part: making those buttons actually do things, which marked my first introduction to the Blocks Editor.

The Blocks Editor reminds me of Apple’s Automator in that it lets you map out your app logic like a puzzle, though the former is obviously much more complex. Getting App Inventor to do what you want is sometimes very easy, assuming it already has a component for that task. Want to store the contents of a text field to a database when the user taps a button? It’s a cinch. Unfortunately, the list of available components sometimes has some frustrating omissions, which I quickly ran into.

Look (For The Right Components) Before You Leap

I initially planned to monitor TechCrunch headlines in my app using an RSS feed, which I assumed would be one of the available components. No dice — as far as I can tell there isn’t any RSS functionality baked in. However, the App Inventor does have some built-in Twitter components, including a search function — perhaps I could simply monitor the TechCrunch Twitter feed for headlines and run the user query against that? After dragging and dropping the proper components into to place (which took all of two minutes), I had the application spitting out Twitter search results for whatever query the user entered, which was very cool. But it’s trickier to monitor an individual Twitter account (I was getting results from all of Twitter), and it was quickly becoming apparent that I didn’t have enough experience with App Inventor to pull this project off. I’ve shelved it for later. Update:Looks like I could have used the join block to add the query and “from:techcrunch” to the search.

My second attempt was to build an application I’ll call Draw N’ Send. Given my initial setback, the application was to be nearly identical to the one produced with the App Inventor PaintPot tutorial, which allows the user to draw with a few colors on a blank canvas (I hoped to add the ability to email the resulting drawing via email). Things got off to a great start, as they often do when you have a step-by-step guide: I quickly got my colored buttons into place, and getting dots and lines to appear on the Canvas when the user dragged their finger on the screen was surprisingly straightforward. With the basic drawing functionality in place, I got ready to set up my email functionality. Which is when I hit roadblock number two: for some reason there’s currently no component to save the contents of a canvas to an image file, so I had nothing to email. So much for that idea.

Outlook

All of which boils down to say a few things. First, while this may be a development environment “for anyone”, it’s still one that you definitely have to learn before it becomes useful. And that is going to be a bit tricky, as there aren’t a ton of tutorials available yet (if you’re looking for more, check out USF Professor Dave Wolber’s Appinventor.org, which isn’t affiliated with Google).

The other key takeaway is that the variety of components offered in App Inventor still has a ways to go — and if the component you need isn’t there, you’re probably out of luck. Google says they’re working to add new ones, and down the line the Component Developer Kit will probably lead to a huge jump in available functionality. But for now, it’s definitely a good idea to get familiar with the available Functions before you start putting everything together. Whoops.

It’s Alive! Taking Android’s App Inventor For A Spin

IPS Resources – IP.Tracker 1.4 ACP: Projects

There’s a plain page or not at all a page r if not an awkward page available to show the information of your company. How does this sound? Does it seem you don’t even exist? Well that’s true. With the huge impact of the World Wide Web in our day to day lives. It has become imperative for all of us to make use the designing tools in order to develop a website for the company and then flaunt it.

This technology has a huge impact in increasing your customer base since it is a source of your existence easily accessible to your users at any point of time. The creativity lies in the arrangement of your content on your website and indeed the display as well.

The reason behind the development of a website   is to have all the various files on various servers available and display the information and the user friendly options to the visitor visiting the site at convenience. For a simple display of images and text languages like HTML/XML can be used. If an another scenario a website is intended to be a highly graphical equipped one, then the use of much complex software such as flash come in to the picture.

Website development

It is imperative to understand the needs being accomplished by the web design created. What would that need be? Firstly, you would want your potential customers to be glued on your website. They should have all the information easily accessible and in a presentable manner. Well to make that possible, all we do for you is go through a planned approach so that the result does not disappoint you.

A website is no different from a book which implies that when you try to read a book, you prefer to have the access to the information at ease. Similarly, the creation of the website requires the context to be in place in order to make the clients aware of your knowledge being imparted and then, follows the designing phase. You have the framework ready and now you need to understand why the website is being created. If it’s a source of enlightening the knowledge of the audience, a basic website would satisfy. In the other case, is you are having it as a source to have transaction with the clients, a dynamic website would be preferred. A clear idea of the targeted audience and style of displaying is essential.

Few steps to take and another source of opening your doors to the potential customer is achieved!