To bring attention to Razer now considering the Mac platform a serious alternative to Windows for gaming, I’m giving away Razer’s flagship mouse, the Mamba. It’s a fantastic mouse, with wired and wireless modes (it even charges when you plug the wire in) and its design matches Mac hardware quite well. It retails for about $120.

And yes, you can disable that blue lighting in software.

I’m also throwing in a complimentary beta key for APB and a Source-engine game of your choice on Steam, like Counter-Strike: Source, Portal, Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life 2 (remember: Steam is coming to Mac in April!).

Retweet this post any time between today and Wednesday, March 17th to qualify. You should follow me on twitter here so I can DM you when the winners are picked. Winners will also be announced on my twitter and the blog April 2nd.

I happily started working for them to make a kick-ass icon. There was an additional challenge as multiple icons were required: a Mac icon, a menubar icon, and an iPhone icon, which required a metaphorical connection between all of them. Buck mentioned they had an idea for using a doghouse for the Mac app and a dog with files on the iPhone, but I recommended against using animal motifs. Not only do we have the classic divide between ‘dog people’ and ‘cat people’ to worry about; animal motifs are just not very suitable in iPhone icons.

And thus the conceptual phase began, which we kicked off with a bunch of sketches of various possible designs and metaphors that could work in the menubar, on an OS X disk image and on the iPhone. I wanted to focus primarily on the iPhone icon design, though, as this was the selling point of the application in the App Store.

Some of the concepts for the iPhone icon.

In the end, we settled for the companion necklace metaphor. Some of the other concepts were nice, but didn’t communicate the application purpose as nicely or had so much branding value. Now the challenge was to extend the concept and develop it further so it could be expressed in a consistent way in all three usage scenarios.

The iPhone icon was mocked up with actual shape layers, and sent to Buck for review. Buck loved it, so I proceeded to iteratively develop it into the final icon.

Above is the full iconparison™ of the first mockup to the last proposed final version. It went through quite a few revisions until we arrived at the final version, with all its nice details that are invisible in the revision history image. The little silver beads on the necklace, for instance, reflect the pillow and pendants accordingly depending on their position in the icon. They were all hand-drawn in Photoshop, though I occasionally did a quick 3D render to check if it was all ‘right’.

I completed the menubar and Mac icon, just in time for the release of the app. Buck did a kick-ass job on the website, using some parts from the iPhone icon’s PSD to make an awesome consistent branded look.

Here File File is available from the App Store, and while biased, I recommend getting it. It’s one of those things that can save your ass when you’re out and forgot a file.

Bricky is a very limited run. There will be no re-prints, so get it now. Printed once more at very high quality by the fine lads of BuyOlympia on genuine American Apparel shirts.

(pardon the random image from the movie)

You can watch the whole thing here. If you do have more questions feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks to Linebreak for having me.

For me, the conclusion after February was clear. I missed out on a few things that annoyed me intensely. Most of the things I missed out on were videos on websites like TED and the New York Times. I had some catching up to do after February. With the help of ClicktoFlash and Youtube and Vimeo’s HTML5 players I was able to watch most of the video content out there, but there is still a lot that you can’t watch without that little plugin. I also ‘missed out’ on a truckload of so-called ‘rich advertisements’, which I absolutely adored.

But the problem of going through your digital life without Flash it’s not just videos on otherwise accessible websites. Try browsing for motion design agency showreels and websites for new games without Flash. Some industries have a vested interest in Flash because it is a mature platform for graphic websites, despite advances in HTML + CSS + Javascript. And I can imagine; the Flash-less approach doesn’t only break down in some browsers, it’s simply not mature yet. Take a look at the current Macheist page. At the time of this writing, it is using 65 to 70 percent of the processing power in my early 2008 Mac Pro, equipped with eight Xeon cores.

Worse still, people hail these Flash-free websites as progress and the road to the future. With terrible performance and compatibility like that, I prefer Flash, despite its drawbacks and proprietary nature. Actually using these technologies and advacing the state of the art is great, but I hope it doens’t put these upcoming standards in a bad light. It’s worth noting, however, that a lot of these techniques are in their infancy.

I’ll be happy with a more efficient and well-performing Flash plugin for Mac, but what I want above everything is a access to the of data that is used by web plugins. It’d be great if I would’ve been able to at least view the motion agencies’ showreels (which are all in Quicktime) and read a bit about games or view some screenshots without requiring a plugin. If I do want to opt into the so-called ‘rich’ web experience, I’ll use Flash, Silverlight, or Web Plugin #4512 to render blinking text and videos projected onto cubes which fall down the screen and bounce around using realistic physics.

Microsoft Labs is doing great things with Silverlight that aren’t possible with Javascript and modern standard-based technologies (yet?), like Pivot, which was demonstrated at TED this year (Flash video – sigh). Pivot’s data, however, for at least half of the video, is the actual web, built on standards and accessible to any technology. This way, if another superior technology comes by or a plugin is no longer supported, anyone can harness the power of the existing data to replicate or even improve on the functionality that we’re so accustomed to. I like that.

There is nobody stopping you from making an iPad or iPhone application using Core Animation which browses Wikipedia like Pivot does – try doing that with all the video that is on the internet.

In conclusion, I’m actually happy to use Flash again to get at all the content I want. I’m equally happy to have missed out on the drawbacks of Flash. While before February I was convinced Flash had no place in the world, I am now a bit more relaxed about it. Flash has its place – but we shouldn’t lose track of the real goal: making the data we want to interface with accessible regardless of the technology I have on my computer, be it a phone, tablet, or PC.