Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
And welcome back to another episode of Crosswires. You've got James here and we've got a really, really fascinating episode for you today because we're going to take a deeper look at UI and UX design from a UI UX designer on possibly some of our favorite apps. And look, we're very biased because he's a friend of the show, but one of our favorite design companies out there. You could almost say they are a factory of design.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: And they're an icon in the industry.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. So Jay, welcome back. You missed the last episode and in fact this is the first time this is happening. So Jay is actually recording from the bead store.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I'm using a rode wireless or wireless micro. And it's actually quite amazing. So it's, I gotta say it's, it's nice.
And we're getting new EchoBee thermostats. I know that's, I know that's random.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: That's just random. But it's home automation.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: We're working on home automation with like.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Store automation, store automation.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Jake, storage information with like home assistant and stuff like that. So tech related.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: I like it. Very random drop. Now we've had a bit of an interesting week with our, with the heat, with our.
Well, I'm not there. I don't have air conditioning. I have a fan. Okay. That's my cooling right now.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Is it your only fan?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Oh, God.
Right, okay.
Just, just the puns don't stop. Anyway, we've had a bit of a week with thermostats.
Thermostats being blamed for things that thermostats shouldn't have been blamed for.
Anyway.
Jake.
Oh, you just derailed the entire intro.
How are you doing? You all right?
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Doing well, doing well.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: How are you doing?
[00:02:01] Speaker A: I am, I am good.
I'm enjoying life at the moment.
Frantically. Probably later tonight. Oh, what, what, what, what?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Got A and W roof beer which.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: You cannot get over the uk not easily. No. And now is that one of a regular size cans? It is. Okay.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: It's one of the ones I was trying to bring and not the mini cans that I brought.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I asked Jay to bring me a W root beer and she brought the tiniest cans possible. Like you, like the airline s fans where you're like, yes, please leave me the can because you've given me virtually no drink. Anyway, look, let's introduce our guest before we go too far down this route. Returning to the show after I think this is now what, the one two, fourth episode you've been On, I think.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's right.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah. No, fifth. Because I think you joined us for a Dub Dub dc, not for an Apple event or something. I mean, you joined us. This might be your fifth.
Oh, no, I'm not sure. Okay.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Getting up there into Saturday Night Live territory.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Absolutely. And after your 10th visit, we give you a free tote bag.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: Okay, great.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: What tote bags? I haven't designed those yet, so.
Welcome back Gideon Mayhew from the Amazing Icon Factory. How are you doing?
[00:03:21] Speaker C: Good. Thanks for having me, James. And Jay, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Oh, likewise. It always is. Now, fair warning, content warning.
This episode may contain sci fi references with no warning.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: I mean, just. Just like Darth Vader always says, live.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Long and Frost for just out.
No, I'm joking. I'm joking. At the time of recording, by the way, we are a day away from season three of Strange New World starting.
[00:03:50] Speaker C: Ah, I'm awesome. I'm so excited about that, that I've been waiting for that forever. It's going to be great.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Do you see the announcement that's come out? But obviously we're going to end after five seasons.
[00:04:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: But the. The ending will be James T. Kirk in command of the Enterprise.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: I didn't see that.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that came out from a panel.
So, yeah, we're going to have Kirk in command. So it's going to transition into the original series.
[00:04:19] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, should be really good. Anyway, Gideon, so for those who haven't listened to our previous episode, do you want to tell people a little bit about who you are and what is this Icon Factory business we're talking about?
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Yeah, Icon Factory. For those who are not in the know, we're a small indie design and software company. We've been around since 1996.
That's when we started.
Next June will be our 30th year in business, hopefully, if all goes well.
And we've been designing software for the App Store since it started back in 2007. We make a bunch of utilities. We've made games in the past.
We do social media apps. We made twitterific, which was one of the first third party Twitter clients for the platform.
And then we recently came out with Tapestry, which was the basis from a Kickstarter that we launched and that was successful.
And that helps you to distill all of your various social sources in the web and blog down into a single unified timeline that you control and filter so you only see and read what you want to see and read.
And I've been Doing what I've been doing since the beginning, which I'm. My job is primarily a designer, but I'm also one of the owners, so I keep the business running from day to day. And I also do tech support and all the other things that an indie shop would need to do in order to come along.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: And I think it's really important. And Gideon said it many times, these guys are an indie house. They are. This is not some. And I'm. This is not some Activision or.
I mean, heck, even. Even. And we love these guys. Even Affinity, who are now owned by Canva, are on magnitudes bigger scale than Icon Factory.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: We're six people. We are six people.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Which you. You wouldn't think from the genuine quality. Now, it's one of the reasons we.
We will be transparent. It's one of the reasons that we've invited Gideon back on the show. A, because we love chatting to him, but B, also because you're.
But now I'm gonna get this one of your developers, Sean, who's I believe, also an owner of a business. Is that correct?
[00:06:42] Speaker C: Sean Heber, Yeah, he's Sean Heber, yeah. Yep. He's a. He's wonderful developer, talented. Been with us many, many years. And I think, you know, he wanted to reach out and let people know our fans know what was going on.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Do you want to. I mean, we don't. Obviously we're not trying to do a substore. We genuinely believe that there's. We want to promote what you guys are doing and we want to talk about the. The world of UI and UX design because it's fascinating especially.
And we know you've got opinions on this with Apple's new Liquid Glass, because you've been trying to design for this thing and we're going to.
But tell it. I mean, look, we. Obviously your first appearance with us was during the whole end of the Twitter API incident with that idiot Elon Musk. Sorry. No, no, no, let's not call him an idiot. Let's call him what he is, a racist Nazi scumbag.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: I'm well behind that. Yeah, and you can add company killer to that list too. I mean, that was the start of. Really, the start of the troubles for us was, you know, Elon came and bought Twitter and then unceremoniously decided to cut off third party access to the service.
And he did that pretty much overnight. He gave no warning, no heads up, no anything for any of the people or companies that were developing for Twitter. He just unilaterally decided to Cut off access on one day. And needless to say, the app that we made, Twitterific, has been there since the beginning of Twitter and had tens of thousands of users.
And a lot of them were paying users and who had paid for their subscription upfront for a year, for example.
And then all of a sudden, Twitter is saying, no, you can't use our service anymore. And Twitterific stopped working overnight.
And all of those people that had already paid for a year's worth of their subscriptions for Twitterific were then, you know, they have an app that's on their phone that they can no longer use. The app doesn't function.
We have to give them refunds. We have to give them refunds for a purchase they've already made, that we've already spent the money for for a whole year. And it was a big, huge debacle, and it was a huge financial hit for us for a small company like ours. Not only that, those refunds, but we also lost the revenue from the sale of that app.
That was the first thing, really, that has hit us really hard. And then, of course, like all of us or so many other companies, the rise of AI out there has really eaten into our core business.
Traditionally, we've been a design house, and we have helped clients design icons, iconography, their websites, their logos, anything along with their app, the user interface, their flows, and all of that. Some of that is less influenced by AI, but there's no doubt that the rise of AI and along with iOS 7, which simplified design on iOS considerably, before iOS 7, everything was scooter morphic and realistic and there was shading and textures and all of these things. And the general public couldn't have produced that kind of artwork themselves. After iOS7, everything got simple. Simple shape, simple shading. And that started to lead towards less work for companies like us because developers said, well, I can do that. I can design that myself.
And so they did, which was fine and great and everything, but it was started a trend. And with the rise of AI and ChatGPT and other services like this, now you can simply describe the icon you would like for your app and it produces it. Does it produce it exactly right? No. Does it give you all of the assets you need for the App Store? No, probably not. But for the 90% of people, or maybe 80%, I don't know the actual percentage, but for the vast majority of those developers, the. Their results are good enough for the App Store.
And you can see it in the apps on the store, you can see it in the apps themselves.
Much of this, the app icon design, is an afterthought, and they don't want to spend money on it or spend at least as little money on it as possible.
And so they've made turns to tools like Midjourney and all of these others.
And that, of course, has also eaten into our business. These things add up. It can be a death by a thousand cuts. And we find ourselves in a place where we're struggling even with just tiny company just like us, of six people.
And we're not talking about a lot of money here. We're talking about what would be considered pocket change to companies like Facebook, Meta and Twitter and all of these others.
So we're trying to get the word about what we do and expand our reach outside of our bubble of those who know us, so that we can get more people into the door and help us sustain our business, keep us doing the stuff we love to do. We love to make apps, we love to make wallpapers and fun digital goodies and games and things that people have known us for, for the last 30 years. We love to do all of these things, but we can' it if we can't pay the bills.
And, you know, traditionally the design side of things has helped us to pay the bills. The App Store is great, but let's face it, it's very difficult to make a living on the App Store. It really is.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: I've been seeing in another realm, YouTube, for instance. All of those thumbnails used to have thumbnail creators. And Mr. Beast got in trouble because he was going to release a tool that was going to create AI, generated thumbnails and put out a lot of people out of business. I mean, AI has been, has been killing a lot of, a lot of artists. And it's sad because you don't know what these tools have been trained on and you don't know, like, what sort whose work is trained on. Yeah, and it's sad that I had not even thought about AI, for I had not thought about the AI's effect on app design and icons.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Right. I mean, it even affects the coding. You can, you can write apps with, with AI or large portions of them with AI. Now, if you ask any coder worth their salt, is that really realistic? They'll probably say no at this point, but it gets better every day. There should certainly come a point where it could be quite possible to do that. Then if you ask AI Bros or whatever, they will say yes, it is possible to create an app from start to finish with AI. And I would love to see them. I would love to see how they really work and if they really do work. But we're going to get there eventually. So it's not just artists, it's engineers too.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: It's engineers, it's content creators like us. When AI, generative AI, is creating such realistic video, it just floods and it drives, I mean, it drives me Crazy on YouTube shorts, the amount of just junk that's on there.
I want to ask you one, just loop back to something with the whole refunds thing because it's something, I don't know if I asked you this when we talked first.
Obviously when you originally sold the app, the only bit of revenue you got was the 70% from Apple. Right?
[00:14:29] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Did you have to cover the whole 100% refund or did Apple help with that?
[00:14:35] Speaker C: Initially we did.
Eventually Apple agreed that this was a one of a kind situation in the App Store that had never happened before and probably would never happen again.
And so they were gracious enough to not, you know, to give back that percentage for us. And that helped. It didn't certainly make all the difference in the world, but it did help quite a bit. And it was, it's because it was such a unique situation.
This huge service like Twitter just suddenly leaves the App Store or didn't leave the App Store. It just turned off access to dozens of apps that had traditionally been able to use its service without warning. If Twitter, if Elon had come and said, okay, in three months you will no longer have access to the API, then we would have had a chance to release an update to stop selling the app and not take revenue for those three months. That would have helped for one thing, but also to get the word out to customers to say, please go and request a refund now if you can. But none of that happened. Elon just decided to do it and he didn't, of course, he doesn't care about all of the people and apps and businesses that were relying on Twitter at the time. And this was the result.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: It's, it's tragic and I mean, thank you for sharing that. And you know, look, I know, I know that Apple get a lot of stick for their developer relationships, but every now and then they get things right. And I think that's a fair example of where they do.
[00:16:20] Speaker C: They do.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: You know, I, I'll be honest, I am very much sort of okay, I could, with my whole developer relationship and my whole third party app stores. I'm somewhere in the middle, honestly. I am, I am somewhere in the middle of that whole. I'm not sure quite what's it. But let's, let's loop back to the whole icon, the app and icon design because Well I, you know I would consider myself to be a designer, but me, I'm a, I'm a print and sort of digital, not signage, but digital elements design. I would, I have the skills to design an app layout. No, and I'll be really upfront about that now.
But what that means is that within the field design and look a generative AI, I can see the benefits of it for your own personal usage, but when you're talking about using it to effectively be the engine of your app or your service or your website design again, you don't know who's. And I gotta wonder how many times maybe you know, I've seen. I remember seeing an app.
No, was it an app or a website that had just stolen so many assets from some of my favorite apps for their website. Like how this was before AI. I mean. Well, AI is just doing more. Jay, quick question for you because you've been using, you were using Twitter as long as I have, maybe longer.
You were a Twitterific user, weren't you?
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: And I think it's just worth. From a user point of view. And I'm going to let you just saying how much thought and effort went into the twitterific ui?
[00:18:06] Speaker B: Oh absolutely. So much done and effort. I mean there's a reason I used it over the default Twitter application because you can get so much more. More done. And, and, and it, it allowed me to like manage multiple accounts and let me do all these things that the, that, that their main, the main application for Twitter just never ever let you do. And, and there were so many things that like you wondered why did they decide to do this way? Obviously some of it was to, to.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: To.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: To do ads and all that is why Twitter did some of the decisions they did. But no, Twitterific was a great application and it's, and it's sad.
Just like with Reddit with the loss of Apollo, it is sad the decisions that have forced.
And seeing what Musk has done with Doge and all this stuff, it's not surprising that he is a quick turnaround person on decisions.
[00:19:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean his, what's his. His tagline is move fast and break things.
So it follows his philosophy. Whatever, he doesn't care. He just forges ahead and in that scheme of things it makes sense.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: I was reading a thread about someone was asking like what it took to create Twitter and they said Twitter used to have a lot of designers, because it's a complete. It was a completely custom built website with all these designers that they no longer have. Now they have people who are trying to shuffle around code and they've lost all of their good coders and designers.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: Right? And now imagine that, but for the Social Security Administration, because that's exactly the same thing.
You know, it's exactly the same thing.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Scary. And the reason I mentioned and asked Jay to mention the quality of Twitterface, because we need to just be really clear that anybody can draw up an app, an app mockup. But it's, it's far more than that. It is about the flows. It's about what connects to what and how, how a user interacts. So can, can you give us a bit of a sort of a, an idiot's guide to what makes a good app design? What, what, what are we looking for that maybe. And again, I want to link this back to a word. Generative AI. Just can't get that concept.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: Well, the first thing I would say is that a good app solves a problem that doesn't just exist.
A lot of AI crap or slop doesn't solve a problem.
It's there just because it can be done.
And so when you start from that point of view, when you start from that place, then nothing after it makes any sense.
A good app that solves a problem, that fills a need for a user is invaluable, whether it's an emotional need or a utility or whatever it may be, if it's a photos app or an audio app or a social app or whatever, there was a problem or a need or a niche that people had and they, they say, what if there was an app that did this and then someone went and designed around that problem to fill that need or solve that problem and the rest flows from that.
It can be things like how frustrating it is to navigate around in the app, the main navigation of it, how seamless it is to go from one part to another if it, if it has performance issues. Is it slow when you scroll or are there delays in using it? Does it sync a lot? Does it require the cloud and how quick that is. All of these things add up. And then there's of course, the visual design, how appealing it is, how, how welcome it is, and, and then how accessible it is. Is it, is it just targeted at sighted users or hearing users? Or can, or can people who, who need those things like voice screen readers, can they use it or not? Is it pared down for that? And Then there's the platforms. Is it optimized for the iPad? Is it optimized for Apple TV or the watch?
All of these things come into play with a good app. A good app takes all of these into account, knows its target audience, where it will be used, and designs and codes accordingly. And the best apps are the ones that do all of these things really well. They make compromises. Of course, you can't have it be perfect everywhere. That's not possible.
But you can make damn well sure that it's pretty solid wherever you use it or wherever your users use it. And that's what makes a really good app, how satisfying it is. The little things, the animations, the sounds, the haptics, all of those things.
I'm mindful of all of that as a designer, but particularly in our apps as well. It's something I've been keen to ever since, like when we made Ramp Champ. I don't know if you remember that game back in the day.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:23:39] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. The little skeeball game that we made. That one really was the one that made me learn and appreciate how well every little bit of polish amounts to a good app or an app that people want to use and they end up loving.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: It's the little small details that matter. It's like, again, I'll show it, AI still doesn't know how to do a proper hand and it does all these things, but a designer who's putting effort into it will design something that looks right.
Part of what AI does is it mimics what it thinks it knows.
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: But it doesn't know what truly goes into designing.
[00:24:26] Speaker C: That is totally the case. Yep.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: And I think it's really important because it's one of my biggest frustrations is that there are amazing machine learning tools for image creation. Like, I'll give a really good example. Pixelmate is super resolution. Right. That is not generative AI, that's machine learning. Taking what you've already created and just increasing the resolution. Now, I mean, Gideon, genuine question if you had something, because again, I've been really clear that there's a difference between generative AI and machine learning. But obviously for icon design, I mean, yeah, actually I'll ask a question now for the App Store, and given that now it is possible to have one app that works across all Apple Silicon things. So Mac, iPhone, iPad.
[00:25:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: How many icon sizes, how many icon assets are you now having to put out there?
[00:25:19] Speaker C: Well, I mean, that's.
I will give Apple credit. This is better in iOS 26.
It's been getting better for years.
When iOS first came out, you had to do, I don't know, 30 different sizes of Hints or something like that. And that's just for iOS.
There were all of these hint sizes and they all had to be optimized and crispened and all of these things. And over the years, Apple has gotten better at that. The last version of the Mac only required a 1024 resource. There's only really one.
So they changed that with the advent of the tinted themes and the dark theme on iOS and things. But with the advent of iOS 26 and liquid glass, in theory, you only need one resource is a single icon composer file and that can be used for everything or nearly everything. You can't use it for Apple TV, you have to make a new version for Apple TV. But that same liquid glass can be used in iOS, the iPad, the Mac and Apple Watch.
So it's gotten a lot better. It has gotten a lot better. I mean, in a way that's great for developers, there's less work to do In a way for us, it's worse because people used to pay us to do those for them and now there's less for us to do for them, you know.
So again, comes back to that.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: No. And that's completely ruined my whole point there. I was going to say machine learning could have actually done a good job for you. Say, okay, you know, I know how I can use machine learning and stuff to properly scale the icons down, but if Apple make it less. I guess obviously the reason people would want to use an icon designer like yourselves is to that you've got the insights and okay, this will look good with the tinted looks with the dark backgrounds and actually let look that leads us into perfectly. Let's talk a little bit about Apple's new UI changes and what it. Because you, you obviously you've been sharing a mastodon quite a bit about your thoughts on Liquid Gas. No Liquid Gas, we are. We're gonna do a whole mavity situation here. We're just going to rename it Liquid Gas from now on.
All right.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it seemed like in the latest beta they've removed a lot of the liquid glass elements.
[00:27:52] Speaker C: Yeah. Or they dialed them back, they scaled them back and to their credit, that's probably a good thing.
It makes things navigation and overlays much easier to read. It increases the contrast of things and navigation and all of these. So they're good changes then. Now, of course, you have a whole bunch of people saying they've gone too far.
And it doesn't look like Liquid Glass anymore, and so on and so on. So there's going to be after some kind of dialing in.
But that said, overall, in the entire time I've been using it, I'm pretty convinced now that it was done just for the sake of it can be done.
There's nothing about it that is compelling enough on its own to say, yes, they should have done this.
It totally is a.
It was a lift from Vision, a hybrid from vision OS and iOS 18. And they kind of mishmash them together and they ended up with this thing that on the surface seems very cool, but when you start to dig down even a little bit, it falls apart pretty fast.
There's no more examples of this than in Safari. If you look at Safari under iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, I find it unusable. The tabs and things in both light and dark mode, they are just, they totally depend on.
And Apple's point of view is it's all about the content. It's not about the ui. The content shines through. The content is the thing that is telling the UI how to behave or how to look, which in some instances is great. But then you go to a web page and it has a black background and the buttons, the nav tabs then become black and the text is almost unreadable.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Ouch.
[00:29:53] Speaker C: And then you change from dark to light mode and it completely opposite. It's like suddenly usable.
So it's really inconsistent. Add to that, the whole UI has tons of more padding around elements because they have to accommodate these very new wide radiuses around buttons and control bars and tab bars. Everything is rounded.
And so in order to accommodate that, everything all around the words, the text, the buttons, the icons, has to have more padding.
So the Chrome itself takes up more space than it did before, takes up more screen real estate than it did before.
Is that, why would you want to do that? Just so that it can look cool as the page scrolls under this pane of glass?
Somehow it doesn't make much sense to me, really. If you want to really hear the good of it, go to Louis Mantia's blog. And he's written a bunch of things about it and he's, he's, he's got some really cogent things to say about Liquid Glass. And I, I, I hope Apple is listening. I'm, I'm sure they are, because they're adjusting things as they go, but it's a long way from where it needs to be.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Thankfully, we are still at the. I mean, what we had developer beta 3 or 4.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: 4. I think 4.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: 4. We have not yet hit the public betas, as far as I'm aware.
I hope we haven't.
[00:31:26] Speaker C: Don't.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Jay's gonna check for me.
I don't think we're. Public beta stage. And again, this is the appropriate time to. To give a psa, unless you're a developer or a designer or a.
Do you notice the word developer, beta or developer in the beta? Seriously. And please, folks, again. And I'm making this plea for all our developer friends, for everyone, for people I know, for Gideon's team.
Folks, if you're running those dev betas yet, look, you take that risk. Don't go crying to the devs at your favorite app. Ain't working yet. Give them time to work on it. They got the beta at the same time you did. Okay, I will say. Go on.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: We're looking at public beta next week.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: That's going to be fun.
And even with public betas, folks, if you are. If you rely on your devices for production stuff, don't do it. Seriously, don't.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: But I can't wait till the fall.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: That's a problem, isn't that people rush and actually, that's another good point, isn't it? When.
When. Because design takes time, right? And it's iterative.
So I mean, you know, two questions. And Jay, jump in at any point with questions. By the way, just, you know, from your point of view as a designer, how do you find that you are constantly to a point where it's ready to go to the client or ready to go into an app? Are you.
Your design is. Doesn't just stay static. You. You think, oh, actually that works better there. Or, you know, that color works better. I mean, for you.
How.
How often are you tweaking something before you think, actually, I'm happy with that.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: Oh, quite often that over and over again.
I. I can use the example of Tapestry. During the Kickstarter, I redesigned the timeline no less than four times.
The. The entire timeline. Visual design was redone four times because of things like that. A color that didn't work or situation that didn't work well or as well as it could have, or we come up against an exception in the code or some particular bit of data from a blog that won't allow you to do something. And then everything has to change in order to accommodate that. And a good. A good developer will do that. They will say. They won't dig in and say, no, we're going to do it this way. It has to be this way. You know, we have to try to find a compromise, it's visual compromise, a coding compromise or whatever, and try to make it work as well as it can for the largest possible audience.
That's the way to make money, that's the way to make an app popular, is to try to make the audience as wide as possible so that as many people will find your app, it's useful and fun to use or useful to use as possible.
So, yes, it happens a lot. We go through a lot of iteration over and over and over and over again, and we're still doing it now. And now we come to Liquid Glass and we're trying to adapt it for Tapestry now and internally.
It is a challenge. It is a challenge. If we were designing in a vacuum and there was Nothing else except iOS26, it wouldn't be as bad. But Tapestry and many other other apps, almost all the apps on the App Store have to work between iOS 18 and 26 when it comes out.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:02] Speaker C: And so whatever code base you use, whatever you, you do for your approaches can't just work in 26. It has to also work in 18.
It has to be backward compatible.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Because Apple's new strategy is not to force the major version updates anymore. And actually credit to them, they are allowing people with security updates to stay on the previous major iOS version. I think that from a stability and gradual change, I think that's really good. What still fascinates me and amazes me is that even when you. Do you remember when Apple used to do the whole comparison of adoption of iOS versions versus Android?
[00:35:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: I don't recall seeing those numbers in any recent events, really. It seems to have a trend we stop. But I still know we can almost guarantee that more iOS users will upgrade to a major version. But because we're no longer forced to it, it gives people time to experience it. But you're right, and, you know, older phones maybe, but still getting security updates, you know, you can stay on 80, people will stay at 18.
And I want to give actually a really good example, Gideon. You just remind me of where someone hasn't thought about design and design in all circumstances and for all types of users. Do you know a really sad thing? This is Apple and this is a current iOS 18 issue. Setting up a new iPhone, setting this up for an elderly lady.
I was actually doing this remotely over FaceTime. It was fun trying to do that. So I got my dad and the, the lady in question or somewhere, which I set everything up well we're trying to. We obviously she's never first iPhone. In fact, not just first iPhone, first smartphone. She was coming from a literal brick. Wow. And we're trying to set up and we obviously chose not transfer anything and we're getting to the signing, you know the icloud sign in.
Well there was the option to forget forgot password or don't have an Apple ID was hidden so badly under a scroll because she for her eyesight had to have it on the largest settings but that was hidden by a scroll and that is look, if you're setting up, if you are a brand new user you kind of need to be able to create an Apple ID without having to like have it hidden. So I someone in Apple and I'm almost certain no ill intention, just didn't think about that, didn't, didn't test it.
[00:37:40] Speaker C: Right.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: And I think that again is well for me you can tell the apps and again and I'm not just saying this because Gideon is here you could tell a lot of testing and sort of like okay, is this working? Has gone into tapestry because it's evident and as you said, you read it, you know, you redesign that timeline. It's very clear apps have gone through proper UX testing. Microsoft Outlook is not one of those apps.
Genuinely is not one of those apps. Shout out to Jay's mum who I still need to work out how how an easy way to move mail to different folders in Outlook because good old Microsoft 365 does not let you have aliases for your 365 email account in Apple Mail now.
Which is a problem when two businesses under the same umbrella share one 365 domain.
Yeah, I'm regretting that move now. I really am regretting that move. I don't think your mum's forgiven me, Jay, for moving into Outlaw bleep. It was the only way to have aliases anyway. Go on.
[00:38:47] Speaker B: It is interesting that you bring that up because I had the experience of trying to onboard two iPads into Apple Business Manager and the interface to get into Apple Configurator was hidden behind a certain screen. It seems like some of modern Apple decisions are very unintuitive. I mean take for instance the new camera controls. They're very much hiding a lot of things nowadays. I mean obviously there was too much before, but now people won't know about all the camera features that are available on it anymore.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:39:26] Speaker C: Making things discoverable is very, very hard.
It can be a pain point for an app particularly. I always go to the typical example of how do you undo something on the iPhone? Well, you shake it.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: I'm sorry, if you're in public and you've made a typo, just come on.
[00:39:51] Speaker C: But unless you know that like that elderly, that senior lady that you were helping, would she ever know that she can shake her phone to undo something she has just typed? No, she would never know that.
No.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: It's kind of like Snapchat where Snapchat's whole thing is hiding features behind different areas and you discover, oh, did you know you can do this and that. I've not used Snapchat in years. But part of it, its appeal for the younger generation was hiding these features. Did you know you could get your lenses this way? You could do all this stuff. And it seems like hiding features is unreal.
[00:40:34] Speaker C: That's totally true. It's just like the hidden menu at In N Out that no one knows about except the people on the inside. They know about it. And so they can order off the special menu and they get the special hamburger, but everyone else is in privy to that information. And so they're just noobs or, or they're Muggles.
[00:40:53] Speaker A: You know, do we have to use the term Muggle?
Yes, it's really. I, I remember my experience. I remember experiencing in and out when I was in California one time and that was.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: The last time I went there.
We went. We were staying somewhere for a week and literally every night we want, we went. We went to like three nights a week. The line in the drive through was an hour.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Right, that's. Yeah, yeah. Because do good food. I mean, I look, I'm. I'm a big bird. I like my burgers. That's obviously by the size of me, you can tell that. Anyway, back to app to UX and ui.
I think it's really interesting. You know, I do app support and it's really interesting and I think it is a point is what works for one user might not work for another user. So. And it's. It could be both ways round. So it can be okay, A user might want a particular feature done a particular way, but they're a minority of users because they've got this complex workflow in their head that only they know versus well what's easy for everyone to use.
And I think, and I might be wrong here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, Gideon, but customization or presenting too many options can be as bad as. Not as hiding elements.
[00:42:23] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely.
If you overwhelm a user with too many choices that Adds friction too. And then they don't want to use it.
It's too, what do I do here, how do I choose? Or how do I do that? That's one of the risks in making, oh, we'll just take that and put it in the settings screen.
You know, if there's an option or a customization or something, we won't expose it, but it'll be there in the settings screen. That way they can get at it and they can do whatever they want with it, but it's not out in the open and it's not mucking up the works. Then what happens? Well, then you have what Apple has now with their settings across iOS and macrosos, where everything in the world is inside of settings and you don't know where to look for it, you don't know how to find it, you don't know what a particular setting does.
It's beyond frustrating.
[00:43:22] Speaker A: Perfect example in iOS 18, for some stupid reason, and I really think this is stupid, Apple have put the FaceTime and Messages options into the apps. So you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom, press apps and then go into your FaceTime and message. I'm sorry, when you're trying to set up someone's new phone, again, that was a challenge. And we, okay, we made a human error and I didn't even think this should be a bit.
This says a lot about, you know, kind of workflows they had and they didn't know they had to do this. They'd gotten the SIM card, so they got the phone through a UK network called GifGaff because GiffGuff do. And actually Gif Gaff are brilliant, but they do refurbished iPhone. So she got a 12 because realistically, a 12 still supported great phone and she got the SIM card. Well, they didn't activate the SIM card with Giff Gaff before popping it in the phone and that meant there was no data connection. Said 5G, but there was no data. So obviously we popped them onto my parents WI fi. But because the SIM card wasn't in the phone when the phone was turned on, we had to reboot the phone to get it to register the phone number to iMessage and FaceTime.
[00:44:40] Speaker C: Yeah, typical.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: It's those little bits of attention. Details. Now, another question I want to ask you and Jake. We both like app variations. Like so, for example, and Gideon, please don't kill me. Ivory by oh, yeah, Ivory is a great app.
[00:45:01] Speaker C: I use it every day.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, because there's a little subtle Irony of that, of course, is that you guys used to be competitors now, I mean, as a complete aside, it wasn't ever a hostile rivalry, was it? You never, like, attacked each other, right?
[00:45:21] Speaker C: No, no, I, I didn't. I don't think we ever did.
I mean, we always kept an eye on what they were doing and we would try to come back with compelling features that would counter things that they were doing. But that's. That's what you have to do when you make a competing app.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: And it's really interesting.
Yeah, prime example. And I've mentioned this, you know, obviously Tripsy, who I am now, very early days, folks, but I'm working with Tripsy on some stuff. I was joking. We said, oh, how do you feel about the flighty guys? We said, oh, no, we know. And we, you know, we get on quite well. And I think in the good developers space and all the good place. There you go. No, maybe. Oh, maybe not, actually. No. That didn't turn out too well, did it? The good developer space. I think there's a lot of camaraderie.
And look, you know, TapBots made TweetBot. They are now making possibly, in my opinion, and again, this is subjective, one of the best Mastodon clients out there. And you guys decided, look, we're not going to make a Mastodon client. We're going to focus on something different, which is what Tapestry is. I'm going to loop back to Tapestry, but I want to talk a little bit. Yeah. Icon. Icon changes. So obviously. So a lot of apps will have, like, different icons that you can choose.
Ivory, for example, has a really nice pride icon for their app and lots of other apps do as well.
Even like the Trainline app has one. Right. It's great from a designer's point of view and particularly in mind of Liquid Glass. And the icon changes.
What's your take on that? Sort of almost like pick your own icon. It's like pick your own adventure.
[00:47:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I love them. We have tons of alternate app icons in our app. Walaroo has like 20 or 30 of them, I think, and Tapestry now has at least that many, if not more. So.
Icons are our thing that we love, the things that we've always made our living with and have enjoyed designing them. So we relish the chance of putting extra alternative app icons in our apps. And they are great ways to differentiate your app. They're wonderful ways for users to be able to customize their app and make it their personal favorite. That's something that they like to see on their Home screen every day they like, they look at. We all look at our phone dozens of times a day. And so we want to look at the things we want to look at. And if, if you have an app that you're like X that is a black thing with a white X and there's nothing else you can set it to, then that. That stinks it. It's no fun.
What is that? You know, that's just junk.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: But you're right. I like. I do love the customization, I guess when we're talking about this new tinted and transparent. When you're building an icon and you're doing your theme customizations, I assume if. Okay, let me rephrase this. So let's say we've got someone who's just got a generative AI icon. They've taken it, it's got loads of copyright material in it, and they then just dump that into the icon. What did you call it? Icon Composer. Icon Composer, yeah.
Without any extra effort from a developer or designer in this case, rather, I should say. Do you get good results when you go into a tinted and other modes I can see ahead.
[00:48:58] Speaker C: It really depends on the artwork itself. It depends on how much contrast it has, how many colors it uses, how simple or complex it is. All of these things that the software tries to do the best job with it that it can. And to Apple's credit, they've done a pretty good job in making it at least usable.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Right?
[00:49:18] Speaker C: It's not going to be something that you're going to be like that looks great.
It's more like, well, that works. It's not nearly what it could be because it wasn't designed by a designer or by a human being or whatever, but it's serviceable.
That's the word that I've come to settle on for a lot of this stuff is serviceable.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: So again, when, when you're thinking folks and genuine, when you're thinking about having someone or do. If you're serious about the quality of your app, you're starting out, yes, it's an investment to get someone like Icon Factory to do your app, to do your icon and do everything, you know, do over bits and pieces, whatever you need. But I can guarantee you that will pay off in the long run. Your users will see, will value your app more, you will have more satisfied customers and you can be proud that you guess it's kind of like paying it forward, isn't it, really? Because if you're a genuine indie app developer, take the time to support a fellow Indie app designer as well. Come on guys, we can help each other out.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: And you're paying for the experience that icon factory has. Because I can. Factory has been around for, since 96, so paying for the years of experience on how to do good ui.
[00:50:37] Speaker C: There's no doubt in my mind that an icon, a good icon matters.
I'm not just saying that because I'm biased. I'm saying that as someone who has massive experience with this, the more attractive, the better design, the more thoughtful your app icon is for your app. The more people will download it, the more Apple may feature it, the more it will get seen. There is a great example of this, an app called Stream. It's a feed reader. It's kind of like a tapestry competitor, but it's made by a friend of mine and he, we didn't design his app icon. The icon Factory didn't do it. He had someone else design it. But the person, the designer that did it and I don't know off the top of my head who designed it, I apologize for that. I, I wish I knew, but I don't. His app icon is awesome and I wish we had done it because it's great.
And I firmly believe that because his app icon is so good, he has gotten featured in the App Store a bunch of times and it just makes people want to download it. It's called Stream and you can find it at stream.heyseed h a y s e e d co and you can go and see the app icon and he's got alternates in there and everything. The app icon, I love it. It's a great app icon and it is a great example of what a difference a great app icon could make. Like I could totally see he could have just done like a solid color background with an S for Stream.
That would have been it. And that's perfectly valid.
For some people that would be fine. But he didn't do that and he worked with his designer to create this great looking thing.
And it makes a difference. It's how you present yourself.
It's your logo, your branding, your marketing all wrapped up in one and it makes a difference.
And that's what we do. And we've been doing it for 30 years and we know how to do it and we've done it for big people, big companies and small companies and we love it.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: But you don't just Mrs. Ware. So I be, I want to talk something.
You guys don't just do app icons. Sean made said actually did you know we did a poster For a conference. You guys do traditional graphic design as well, right?
[00:53:08] Speaker C: Yeah, we do. We do logo design, we do illustration, we do website design. If it's design related, we probably have done it. Yeah, we did the poster for WWDC for Jack Dempsey concert there at wwdc and he approached us to do it and we had a blast doing it. It was fun outside the usual that we usually do, but it was great. It was fun. And it's unusual to get stuff printed, to see a physical print of something instead of having it just be in the digital realm. And that was a nice change of pace and it was a very fun project.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: It was going just as it's for our video and few things. I know exactly how you feel because seeing this is some of my design work. This is the rebrand for blooming beads because it needed a rebrand. But seeing my design work in paper. Do you want to turn that around, Jay?
Because. Yeah, there you go. Just something magical about seeing you work in print. Right. Which is great. Now then that kind of leads me onto something that we have a toggy team that we're doing and we're going to do it now. So you might have figured out that J that Crosswires also does graphic design, because that's. That's what I do for the Beast or a few other people.
Well, I'm going to ask you a lot of favor. If you're listening to this show right now, if you're listening to this episode and you need any sort of graphic design, don't come to us.
Please go to the icon factory for at least the next six months, if not more. Because look, first of all, I mean, there's two reasons for this. First of all, we want to support Gideon and the team.
Secondly, honestly, at the moment, I don't have the time to take on new projects because I'm trying to build the bead store with Jay. It's. It's our future. But more importantly, I, you know, I want, genuinely want to get some support if you know. I mean, it's really interesting, actually. It makes me smile. Open source projects, right? Yes. I know you don't have much of a budget, but open source projects can be made so much more attractive with good icon design, good website design. These guys will give you. I know, will give you the. The thing is, Gideon, his team are so ethically focused, they will give you a fair price for the honest hard work if you go and get grant funding. Seriously, there is funding out there for open source projects to have design work done.
You know, James Smith could tell you all about that.
[00:55:33] Speaker B: Well, like, like Signals is one of our favorite apps and that they're a foundation and they have a well designed app icon.
[00:55:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Just because your app isn't maybe profit, isn't maybe making money.
Take the time. If you need your website redone, go and talk to these guys because they can do it and they will do a cracking job. I genuinely mean this. So, yeah, as from this point forward, any design what you need, go to the icon factory.
[00:56:03] Speaker C: You guys are too generous and I don't know what to say to that except thanks. I mean, I genuinely don't enjoy having to say we're not doing well or we need help or we need people to understand what we do so that we can keep in business to stay in business.
It's never been that way for us. We've always somehow seemed to weather financial storms and all of these things, but these days it's a different matter.
There's a sea change about.
And it's not just for us, it's for everybody. It really is for everybody.
Creatives in general are having a very hard time. Whether you're writing, you're designing, your cinematographer, a videographer, a YouTuber.
I go on YouTube and I look for reviews for a product or something and I get a result of 10 AI generated reviews of stuff.
And it's like, okay, you know, these are generated by somebody in their basement.
Not even who's a reviewer of something, they just, they spit it out and put it up on YouTube for eyeballs. And that's what they do.
And so we're in a place now, I think, where people are, they're struggling, but even it makes what we do and what you do and so many others so much more valuable because it actually is created with expertise and care and love.
And people who care about these things want to do a good job.
They want to make things for people who care about what they do. And they don't want to just use lifted unethical content from millions of other people and generate the slope.
And so we say thanks and there's nothing else I can say.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: I think one area that I definitely appreciate is my phone wallpaper is through wallaroo. And that's one of your apps. And I like it because I know that the wallpaper time was spent putting the wallpapers together and.
And it's not just.
I like that. It's not just a wallpaper that I got off the Internet, but it's got Google images, right?
[00:58:49] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: Because that's how people get on wallpaper. Right.
So go on, Gideon.
[00:58:55] Speaker C: No, that's a great example of it. There are a lot of wallpaper apps on the App Store, and a lot of them feature AI generated walls and they even have AI in them. You can make a wallpaper of whatever you want, you know, type it in and your prompt and we'll generate your wallpaper. For a lot of people, that's fine. That's good.
They don't mind it. They like it.
More power to them.
But for others who everything ends up looking the same.
It all ends up in the same AI. Uncanny valley, weird landscape.
Then there's apps like Walaroo, where everything is designed by hand and we care.
[00:59:39] Speaker A: About and it shows.
I've just opened Walaroo, by the way, which is not just for iPhone, iPad and Mac. And now I have to admit I've not been in a while because I'm not. I'm one of those people. Obviously we have Walaroo and we lovingly pay for it, but I don't change my.
Yeah, no, I've just gone into the Mac and whoever I do does it tell me who designed it. Hold on. Yeah, so how do I find out who designed a particular.
[01:00:08] Speaker C: Hit the little info icon on the wallpaper when you open it up.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Okay, so this is by Brian Brasher, and it is the Mel Tendo. Yeah, it is gorgeous.
The switch to. Because I've got to switch to it sat down there.
That is just beautiful. But the detail.
I'm sorry. And the Superman logo, which is. That's by Tak. I'm gonna pronounce names. Taka, Talos.
Let me stop it.
You know, and by the way, these are all tagged. There are truly beautiful. There's also. I mean, Obviously we've the pride 24, 20, 25.
[01:00:50] Speaker B: 25. With the different pride styles, like the trans colors.
[01:00:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[01:00:57] Speaker C: Really proud of that one.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: You know, that is gorgeous. Just. Absolutely. And these are just. You can tell the love went into these. Now, Gideon, how much. If people want to get Walaroo, how much is it? Because I think Walaroo itself is free, but then there's a premium or a Patreon, isn't there?
[01:01:15] Speaker C: Yeah, you can download it and use it for free. We release a free wallpaper every month, so there are already tons of free wallpapers in Walleroo. You can use it and download them and use them at will.
But if you want, you can also subscribe in the App Store. I think it is 9. 99 a year.
[01:01:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really affordable.
[01:01:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
But if you want bonus wallpapers and you want all the extra content, then you subscribe to our Patreon and that's, that's $10 a month.
And you get a lot more for that. And you get, you get exclusive wallpapers that no other user gets and you get sneak peeks into things that we're doing and you can talk to us and make suggestions for future wallpapers. And you also get icon sets. Tal's just released a soup, a Superman icon set with every Superman logo from 1933 to the current day as an icon set for your Mac.
Wow.
There's stuff like that if you're a Patreon supporter that you don't get when.
[01:02:22] Speaker A: You just use Wallero, which is really. And I love, by the way, that you've got that free, that free.
The free tier. Not just for free tier, but the free tiers of support and Patreons. I mean, you know, we, we are working our Patreon. It's just the workflow of what content we can put out to you and when.
[01:02:38] Speaker B: Well, so, and I can say that, that we are Patreon supporters of Icon Factory.
[01:02:43] Speaker A: We are absolutely, absolutely. Because we value you guys and we, we want to do that now, the next, the next of the way. So first of all, obviously, give them graphic design work.
Secondly, go and support Wallaroo through one of the methods just, even just download it helps the next one if, if, if, if. And, and I can see. No, I mean, look, Jay and I'll be transparent. We are saving up funds to do this.
Maybe you'd like a new social media profile image or you know, maybe you are doing your. And we're doing our crosswise website through, through webflow of all things. Which, I mean, look, I'm, I love webflow because it still exposes all the design. So I can still control the padding. Yeah, okay. It's not manual design, but it's pretty damn close. Pixel portraits.
[01:03:29] Speaker C: We started doing them during Tapestry as an add on for the Tapestry Kickstarter. Yeah, people just love the pixel portraits. And we were like, well, after the Kickstarter was done, can I get a pixel portrait? And we just didn't have time to do them.
And then we were like, well, we should really bring these back. Like, let's just offer them as a service.
And so we've started it. We launched it a couple weeks ago and it's been pretty successful. People have all the people that didn't order them while they were, while we had Tapestry The Tapestry Kickstarter. Now they're like, oh, I can finally have a Pixel portrait. And they go and they ordered it and we've fulfilled a bunch of them and they take time to do and we want to do them right. And they're. You know, it's a specialized skill, of course. And it's really hard to capture someone in a 64 by 64 square with so many colors and things, but it's pretty neat.
[01:04:29] Speaker A: And again, look, you know, and we want. You could. You could take your photo and put it through AI Pixel Portrait.
[01:04:35] Speaker C: Right.
[01:04:36] Speaker A: Won't have the same quality. It'll be. It won't look as good, folks.
[01:04:40] Speaker C: No.
[01:04:41] Speaker A: Again, that's the sort of thing that you would like. And we are really looking at it because we think it'd be great for the. You know, for. Because we've got. So for our live streams, we've had a friend of ours, Sirius, do actual like avatars of us. You'll appreciate mine and if you ever check out our streams folks, you'll see it. Mine is me In a late DS9/first contract contact EVA Starfleet uniform.
[01:05:07] Speaker C: Cool.
[01:05:07] Speaker A: Which is. I'm sorry, that is my favorite.
[01:05:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:05:10] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. You with me? Okay.
[01:05:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:05:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
I have a. I should probably. I'm gonna get nailed for being so dirty. Jay and I hoping to get married next year if we can. Now of course there is talk about what we know where it might happen because figured what I'm going to be wedding wearing to the wedding might well be a VAT era captain's dress uniform from the tng.
[01:05:38] Speaker C: Nice.
[01:05:39] Speaker A: But from a first Contact onwards. So like, you know, obviously Picard wore in Nemesis for Riku and Troy's wedding.
[01:05:46] Speaker C: Yeah, the white. The white outfit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:05:50] Speaker A: And I don't mean the one you'll be wearing on Beta's ed.
[01:05:54] Speaker C: Not with the hair piece I assume, but yeah.
[01:05:57] Speaker A: Oh, no, no, the. You change your thought. No, no, no. I meant the one for. You know where we will all appear in the traditional Beta Z.
Yes, yes, yes.
So actually I do want to say what. Okay. We are in 2025, right? Where's our beautiful. Where are we? Where are. Why have we not got beautiful L cars? Where's L cars?
[01:06:20] Speaker C: Yeah, right. You know, it's a crime that we don't.
[01:06:23] Speaker B: I mean it is in Pie Hole.
[01:06:26] Speaker A: That is true. Yes. If you. So if anyone. Yeah. There's a pipe. There's a L Cars theme for the Pie Hole DNS tool, which is gorgeous. Here. My Pie Hole has L Cars.
[01:06:39] Speaker B: Mine too.
[01:06:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I thought yours might do somehow, but you know, the Akudas need to. There you go. The Yakudas. Oh, there you go. That's a collaboration waiting to happen. Michael and Denny and Sukuda X Icon Factory.
[01:06:52] Speaker C: Yeah, that would be good. That would be a dream job. Yes, that would be fantastic.
I've always idolized Akuda. He's wonderful and he's such a great designer and he's very level headed and he has a clear vision of that stuff that all of the graphics that he's ever done for Trek all along the way have just been awesome. And I've been lucky enough to interact with him a couple times back on Twitter I asked him questions and he actually would answer me and stuff. It's just like, wow, this is awesome.
You're my new hero.
So, yeah, he's great.
[01:07:28] Speaker A: Culture did a really cool interview with him recently about, you know, all the design they've done and it's still, you know, it's beautiful. I mean, you know, one of the things. Very random. One of the things I really adore about Strange New Worlds, which is for those who don't know, Strange New Worlds is set before the original Star Trek series.
Now obviously they couldn't just go back and do all the ToS style buttons in the UI. It wouldn't work today. The design of the Enterprise wouldn't work in today's modern tv. But honestly, I think they've done this beautiful job of reimagining it in such a way that it you could believe. Okay. If TOS was filmed today, it would look like that.
[01:08:14] Speaker C: Right.
[01:08:15] Speaker B: You know, I agree.
[01:08:16] Speaker C: So, yeah, totally impressed with the production design and the visual design of Strange New Worlds. It much more than Discovery. Discovery did not seem to fit at all. But Strange New World is definitely right in there in the zone.
[01:08:32] Speaker A: Well, how Discovery had like holograms. That made no sense to me whatsoever.
[01:08:38] Speaker C: Yeah, just.
[01:08:39] Speaker A: Anyway, that's a whole different. I think we've done a. We've done a UI of a Sci Fi episode, I believe.
[01:08:50] Speaker C: Tag him up. Yeah, we did the interfaces of Science fiction. Yeah, that's it.
[01:08:54] Speaker A: We did that. Yeah. A good data podcast we called it. That's right. We'll put a link to that in Michelle's. Now obviously we on Tapestry. We should mention Tapestry because of course, look, I meant of course. I mean you guys have got so many great apps. Just go over to a site. But Tapestry, again, as Gideon mentioned earlier, great way to get all of your ingestion all your sources right into one place. That you control. That's non algorithmic. It's just pulling the data, right? You control it.
[01:09:23] Speaker C: There's no algorithm. You put in your favorite blogs, your favorite YouTube channels, your favorite podcasts, your favorite people on Mastodon or on Blue sky or on Tumblr, and you see all of their entries in. In chronological order as they come. We don't decide what you see and what you don't see, you decide that.
And if you want to create filters to help you stay sane in today's political world, you can do that. And you don't have to look at certain things. Or if you want to create ways so you don't get spoiled on the new Superman movie across all of social media, you can. Oh yeah, you can do that. So Tapestry is great for doing that. And by, by creating a single unified timeline, you don't have to worry about a spoiler that appears on YouTube and also on Mastodon and also on Blue sky, because the app takes that all into consideration and you can filter it.
So.
Or a certain, certain person that you don't want to read their stuff about, you can filter them too.
[01:10:31] Speaker A: Well. That's why Gideon never gets any of my. My mentions anymore.
No, no, we, we. No, I mean, I hadn't actually thought about the filtering point. That's a really good thing. A good point is I really should be using. And there's also Tapestry iPhone, I think. Just remind me, is there a very.
[01:10:51] Speaker C: Is there an iPad iOS app and an emulated Mac app? It's the Mac app. We're working on the native version now and it's getting there, but it's going to be a little bit longer.
[01:11:05] Speaker A: It's tricky, but I guess there is a huge advantage with Apple Silicon. If you have got an Apple Silicon map. Map Apple Silicon Map, Apple Silicon Mac, you can run emulated iPhone apps, obviously. And I guess in this case it'll be probably Emulated iPad.
[01:11:23] Speaker C: Yes. An iPad app.
[01:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So again, look, I'm sure Gideon will say, yeah, it's okay in a pinch, but, you know, a real experience, there's things you have to tweak. It's not as you have to design for the platform you're on now, I've got to ask one quick question.
Are we going to get.
Are we going to get Tapestry for Vision os?
[01:11:48] Speaker C: You can actually, we turn the switch on it so you can run it on Vision os. Again, it's an emulated version. It's not a native Vision version, but I've used it on Vision and it's great. It's actually pretty fun on Vision.
[01:12:05] Speaker A: Cool.
[01:12:06] Speaker C: So, yeah, it does work there. It's neat.
[01:12:08] Speaker A: All right.
Nice.
[01:12:10] Speaker B: And not to put you on the spot, are we gonna get, like, a ramp champ on the Apple Arcade?
[01:12:16] Speaker C: Ramp champ's long gone, I'm sorry to say.
[01:12:19] Speaker A: Oh, rest in peace.
[01:12:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:12:21] Speaker A: Oh, could you not bring it back for a 30th anniversary? Could we tease?
[01:12:26] Speaker C: I would. I would say that's a distinct possibility, but we sold the rights to Ramp Champions long, long ago, so we don't actually own the rights to the game anymore.
[01:12:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's a shame. Oh, well. Oh, well, I was gonna say we could always bring back Twitterific with, like, Wayback Machine, but I don't know. Or make. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. James. Stop, stop, stop, Stop encouraging Gideon to waste time on. On pointless social media platforms that are ruined.
It is an X. Appreciate. It's an X.
Oh, geez. I just realized we could, you know, we could have played on that with the whole Monty Python. This parrot, this API is no more. It is pining for the fjords.
We genuinely have had a lot of fun talking about this and honestly, it's been so much fun to get an insight into design and I think, look, folks, if you've got any questions, you know, obviously follow Gideon. In fact, we'll. We'll get Gideon to do a proper out of where we can find him. But talk to us. Come and join us in discord.
You know, come and drop his email. We can always pass it on to Gideon for you. And get, get. I'm sure Gideon will take the time to answer well thought out questions, polite questions. Please, folks.
You know, let's. Let's be respectful of our. Of our guests. We always are you lot of an amazing community. I'm really honored to have you, to have you all.
But do go and check out the icon factory's website. Go and go and hire them, Go and get their apps because look, there's so few genuinely handcrafted apps and experiences. We're getting fewer by a day because stuff is just going to AI. I mean, the business I work for is talking about doing so much more with AI and it scares the living. The Jesus out of me because I, I can. Look, I.
I don't hate AI. I just want it to be used responsibly. And I'm sorry, but no AI at this, at this point in time can compare with a human experience and a human's craft because, you know, creativity is a genuine gift, right? And it's something that not Everybody has. Admittedly, I. I can't. I'm not a good sketcher. I can't draw. Oh, I think Linear sketch is yours. Is it linear?
[01:14:42] Speaker C: Yeah, linear.
[01:14:42] Speaker A: Yes. That's yours as well. There you go. Honestly, they've got so many great apps. Xcope, just guys go and check them out.
But Gideon, thank you so much for joining us, as always. Do you want. I mean, we've already, like, promoted almost. I mean, we can spend the next hour promoting everything you ever done. Where can people find more about you? Where can people follow you? Not in a stalker way, folks. Where can people follow Gideon?
[01:15:10] Speaker C: If you want to follow me on.
On Mastodon, that's.
I'm Mastodon socialiteonm.
That's my social media home.
All of the Icon Factory apps and services can be found@iconfactory.com. there's links to all of our things there, a link to the apps that. All the apps that we produce in the App Store, as well as some apps that aren't in the App Store. And then also our blog, the Pixel Portraits link to the Pixel Portraits are there and everything else. So that's where you'd find us. Iconfactory.com.
[01:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And your dog agrees wholeheartedly.
[01:15:52] Speaker C: That Amazon van just pulled up and of course now he's going to be barking his head off. I want to mute myself here.
[01:15:58] Speaker A: Oh, good. Oh, good.
What I was going to say.
Yes. And I believe you guys set up your own Mastodon Instance as well. So you are.
[01:16:12] Speaker C: Yes. So Icon Factory world, is there Mastodon Instance for that?
[01:16:18] Speaker A: Awesome. And we will put all of that into the show notes, folks. Gideon, thank you so much. It genuinely been a pleasure. Jay, where can people follow you? Because we never really do this bit right. We never get our own socials out. But where can people find you?
[01:16:32] Speaker B: So I amcedodon.me.uk and then you can find me on crosswires. So whenever I'm able to make an episode.
[01:16:44] Speaker A: Hey, it's been great now. I'm glad we got you into this. Onto this one and hey, look. But real promo for the road. In fact, actually two of the three microphones used today are rode microphones. I've got the podmic. You're using the wireless micro.
I'm not sure what you're using. Is that an SM7B you're using? Gideon, you're muted, I think. Oh.
[01:17:11] Speaker C: The Amazon guy just walked away from the front door. There was a. There was a bark fest there. What was the question? I'm sorry.
[01:17:18] Speaker A: Sorry. That's all right. Saying What? Because we're just comparing like mics. What? Mike, just wonder what mic you're using for business. Is that SM7B or is it.
[01:17:26] Speaker C: Yes, a 7B.
[01:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Which Jay would normally be using. So why is she in good company? Just because she's at the store.
Awesome. Thank you, Jay. And you can follow me.
J.S. billsborough. So J.S. billsboro. And Billsboro is B I L S B R O U G H and I'm also@mastodon.me.uk and you can of course find me on all the Crosswire stuff as well.
We while we're gonna ask you to give all your design work to the Icon Factory, if you need IT support or app support or network stuff, head over to Crosswires.net there's a link up at the top where you can actually request a free 30 minute call with, with myself to discuss your support needs.
[01:18:12] Speaker C: That's really cool. That's great.
[01:18:14] Speaker A: Do that. Oh yeah, we, you know, we do that. We've. We've just been doing a load of work. We're really excited. We work very closely with Ninja 1. So if you want your. If you want.
Okay. Whether you want fully managed it where we handle all the support requests or like one of our new clients where we're going to be the second line support but we provide them with the monitoring tools. Provide them with the antivirus across Mac Windows, Linux. And we've just tested this out in the bead store as well.
MDM for Apple devices through Ninja 1.
Isn't it cool, Jay?
[01:18:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:18:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So we. Because it's kind of weird because I work.
I am a contractor for the bistore but I'm in a management position and we do variety. It's all very wibbly, wobbly tummy wimey stuff. Oh yeah, it's great fun.
It's great fun. And of course don't forget that we do live stream. Jay's leading the live streaming this week because I've got parental visits.
[01:19:17] Speaker C: That sounds bad.
[01:19:18] Speaker A: My parents are coming down tomorrow.
I've got to. I've got to get the apartment, the flat.
I've got to get the flat cleaned to a point where I'm happy for my mum to then clean it because. And I don't ask her to clean it. My mum just cleans. She turns up and she cleans.
It's amazing though. She does a great job. I love. I genuinely adore my parents. On that very soppy note, make sure you go and check out the Icon Factory. We'll be back with some really great episodes soon.
We'll put some links to we'll obviously put links to all Gideon's past episodes in in the show show notes, and we have some really cool stuff coming lined up soon as well. So with that we will roll that outro.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Crosswires. We hope you've enjoyed our discussion and we'd love to hear your thoughts. So please drop us a Note over to podcastrosswires.net why not come and join our Discord community over@crosswise.com we've got lots of text channels, we've even got voice channels, and we've got forum posts for every episode that we put out there. If you are Mastodon, you can also follow us either by heading over to Wires Social or just follow Crossed Wires Social.
[01:20:36] Speaker C: If you'd like to check out more.
[01:20:37] Speaker B: Of our content, head on over to CrossedWires.net YouTube for all our videos, and keep an eye on our twitch channel@crossedwires.net live for our upcoming streams.
[01:20:48] Speaker A: If you like what we heard, please do drop a review in your podcast directory of choice. It really does help spread the word about the show.
[01:20:54] Speaker B: And of course, if you can spare even the smallest amount of financial support, we'd be incredibly grateful. You can Support us at ko fi.comCrossedWires I.e. K-O-F I.comCrossedWires until next time, thanks for listening.
