On this day (September 3rd) several years ago, our chief geek was born. (No, no – we’re not going to reveal his age here.)
Michael is our awesome coder and one of the key faces behind Foound. Along with the rest of the team, he spent his entire birthday working on Foound’s backend, so major kudos to him!
The team surprised him with a cake this evening at Foound’s HQ. We decided not to represent his actual age on the cake but the age of ’21′ instead, because age is just a number.
Here’s Mike with his trademark pose, looking totally ecstatic with his cake.
As part of the birthday festivities, he was made to wear a paper cut-out of a lens flare on his head. (This was Aen’s idea!) It was meant to represent the fact that he has a very bright head. Uh, oops. We meant, a very bright mind!
The birthday boy again, captured in vintage using the Hipstamatic iPhone app. (With lens flares added in Photoshop.)
Mike, with the rest of the Foound team.
The Foound team loves you, Mike! Wishing you a very Happy Birthday!
In the next couple of releases of Foound which you can expect in the coming weeks, we will be replacing an old feature with a new one which will make the experience of using Foound better. It is not appropriate for me to disclose what feature it is now but I can tell you something about the work I have been doing the future release.
Over the past two days I have been working on a set of 16px icons which will be used in the Foound web and iPhone app. It is really my first time seriously making icons and I did contemplate convincing Danny in outsourcing the icon design to a professional. The set contains sixteen icons which will be used in the app interfaces and will replace existing Fugue icons. The icons were first sketched on paper, illustrated in Photoshop and Illustrator and finally hand-detailed in Photoshop. I took inspiration from various icons sets out there like FamFamFam, Fugue and my favorite Facebook.com icons and also added fine detailing to make the icons look more crafted and delightful.
A brief run through of the icons (from left to right): Continue Reading…
The iPhone 4 features a high resolution display called the ‘Retina Display’ which can hold four times the number of pixels of previous iPhones in the same physical screen space, resulting in a really high level of definition. Because of this, the iPhone 4 requires some effort from developers to optimize their apps for the new display. Native UI controls are vectors drawn by the system and thus displayed perfectly by default, but raster graphics such as PNGs created by the developer have to be optimized.
We are currently developing future releases of Foound with the iPhone 4 in mind so I have been working on creating Retina versions of the interface graphics for the last two days. The graphics for the interface are created in Photoshop as shapes and layer styles that allowed me to double the pixel dimensions of the images easily. My initial thought was creating Retina versions of the graphics would simply be doubling the existing images but it turns out the native Retina graphics which I want to replicate have subtle but substantial differences and are not products of mere doubling.
Native button (left) and Teehan+Lax iPhone 4 UI PSD doubled (right)
Watch Lichi, our Chief Evangelist talk about how the usage of the mobile phone should maximized based on its inherent characteristics of being accessible and personalized during his keynote presentation at OpenWebAsia 2010.
Source: Satoo.TV
Friends and families, and most importantly, supportive fans who couldn’t hold back their app-downloading-happy fingers, the Foound app just got the green light on the Apple App Store. Download it from the Apple App Store now. And most importantly, start hanging out with friends with the help of the app.
For those who have not yet heard of Foound, it’s a free application available on iPhone that makes organizing hangouts easy.
The Bad Ol’ Past
We all play this SMS Ping Pong regularly. No doubt you have played the role of Danny, Brenda or Aen throughout your texting career. While it’s a common social interaction, organizing a hangout for friends is sometimes frustrating. That is because mobilizing a group of people to a specific time and place is inherently complex on account of needs of each individual (availability, time, venue preference, etc.)
The Future of Hangouts with Foound
Foound is designed to help you spend more time on hanging out and doing fun things with friends, instead of time on organizing it.
Now isn’t this much easier? No more spending half an hour just to get a few friends together, let alone the SMS charges that add up monthly. Of course, you can use Foound to organize any kind of events, casual or business, friends or family. All you need is an iPhone and the app, which is free.
So what are you waiting for? Go download it and start hanging out with your friends!
