Just comment on this post with your new years resolution is going to be. We will choose 10 random comments and the winners will be picked Friday, January 8th, 2010.

I love it when everyone’s a winner!!!

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Ring in 2010 With a Google Wave Invite – Winners Announced!

1. Iconfactory

Icon factory has always had a selection of beautiful finely crafted icons. They are responsible for the beautiful UI of Twitteriffic & Ramp Champ.

Do one thing and do it well. If ever there was a philosophy for what we do here at the Iconfactory, this would be it. From day one we have dedicated ourselves to being the best in the challenging and niche field of icon design.

2. 365 Icon

Whats better than an icon site? One with an icon for everyday of course.

3. We Love Icons

We love icons. Do you?

We Love Icons is a joint project by Guifx designers Dan Wiersema and Nando Albuquerque. We started We Love Icons because, well… we love icons! Our sole purpose is to provide you with ONE place to go to find links to the BEST freeware icons on earth.

4. Interfacelift

My Interface needs a lift. I can has?

Interface lift has always had great icons and backgrounds. They have iPhone backgrounds in their arsenal too. If you like to change your background several times in a month and love customizing things this is your place!

5. Prettify

Dang. That there is prettified.

Nice icons and wallpapers for the discerning individual, collected and curated.

6. Deviant Art

I need some art.

With over 80,000 images uploaded a day and 2 million hits its hard to argue that there won’t be fresh content here daily. They have icons all over the place as well as anything else that the word “art” could encompass. Check it out.

7. Pixel Girl Presents

Pixie Girl to the rescue.

A recent favorite of mine. Pixel Girl has a copious amount of icons on her site and a good amount of cartoon/illustrated ones. This is definitely a site worth checking out.

Extra Resources from Comments:

Where do you like to grab your icons from?

IconFinder

Iconerz

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7 places to Find New App Icons

**UPDATED**

9/23/09

10/15/09

11/11/09

Articles:

iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Phone and iPod touch are sophisticated devices that combine the revolutionary Multi-Touch interface with powerful features, such as email and instant-messaging capability, a full-featured web browser, iPod, and, in iPhone, a mobile phone.

The Making of Things iPhone

One of the first major design decisions was to either have a Tab Bar or a Toolbar.

We liked the idea of a Tab Bar very much as it allowed to quickly browse your tasks from different perspectives (by Projects, by Tags, by Due Date, Search, …)

How to Create Your First iPhone Application

What if you had a nickle for every time you heard: “I have the perfect idea for a great application!“? It’s the buzz on the street. The iPhone has created unprecedented excitement and innovation from people both inside and outside the software development community. Still for those outside the development world, the process is a bit of a mystery.

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch

Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it.

Inspiration:

60 Sleek and Sexy iPhone App Websites

Like most of Apple’s expensive toys, the iPhone is a beautiful piece of kit. Its cool curves and bright display seem perfectly suited to sleek, glossy web design. Here’s a big bunch of lovely iPhone app websites for your admiration and inspiration.

Downloads:

iPhone GUI PSD

Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit

Today, we are glad to release the iPhone Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as six different iPhone interface options. This pack may be useful for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups to clients or to work out ideas. This set was designed by Renee Rist especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Ultimate iPhone Stencil

This is the ultimate stencil for folks designing iPhone interfaces.

• Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements

• Text is fully editable on lists, title bars, buttons, and scroll wheels

• Buttons can be resized horizontally by ungrouping, resizing the middle element, and then regrouping the elements back into a single button

iPhone PSD file

iPhone PSD for snapshots, icons, etc… Made entirely in photoshop. Based on the iPhone design by Apple Inc.

Resources:

MobileLex 2009

Sam offers his Keynote slides from MobileLex that highlights:

How I Made an App that Has Over a Million Users

Scrolling Like Butter

Web Services with Cocoa

iPhone Development: The Why and How

I cover what your options are for iPhone development and some tips and resources on how/where to get started. I also speak about how to maintain a good user experience with your iPhone development. Check it out!

The definitive iPhone user interface gallery from Engadget

After getting our hands on the iPhone we set ourselves the irresistible task of photographing every conceivable menu option available to us. So here it is: the definitive iPhone user interface gallery, almost 300 images deep. If you’re the type to obsessively pore over every possible menu, submenu, setting, and function in a new device, this one goes out to you.

Coding:

iPhone View Switching Tutorial

The world of iPhone development can be a bit of a daunting task and irritating at times. I’m the kind of person that likes to do things from scratch as much as I can. So when I headed down this path, I decided to start with the simplest template and create a very, very easy app: creating 2 views and switching between them.

14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs

Cutting Through The Clutter

We’ve collected a set of tips, resources, how-tos, tutorials and links ranging from newbie-to-expert to help you wring the maximum amount of productivity out of Xcode.

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone

We’re going to start off with 2 psd’s I made and get those working in an iPhone page. I am using images for the background and header although you could use just straight colors instead of images.

Tools:

Notepod

What’s a Notepod 3-Pack?

Three 60 x 110mm, 100pp Notepods printed on both sides. 80gsm laser throughout with a stiff black strawboard back.

Design Comission iPhone Stencil

- Layout Nav Bar, Tab Bar and Keyboard
- New overlay icons provide cleaner look
- Additional icons
- Overall dimensioning and layout improvements

Quickly sketch out iPhone UI prototypes. Brainstorm your application ideas using our precision cut stainless steel stencil and mechanical pencil.

Mobile Sketchbook

• 100 pages of to-scale design templates
• One organized place for User Interface Designs
• Get your designs down on the Sketch Book today!

What Not To Do:

iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals

The development of iPhone applications has recently become a hot topic in the design community; everybody tries to come up with some creative idea, port it into a stylish iPhone-alike application and sell it to thousands of users through the iPhone app store. However, many of these applications are poorly designed and therefore miss the chance of providing users with a truly useful product that users would find worth recommending to friends and colleagues.

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An Ever Growing iPhone Resource Thread

**BONUS** Winning tweets are included!!

1. Travis Grawey • @Tgraw

I love design. I love creativity. I love my wife. Video games are cool, too. txt ‘THG’ to 50500
thgcreative.com

2. Dreamscape Media • @dreamscapeM

India’s leading web consultancy.

dreamscape.co.in

3.  Christian Collard • @Printedproof

Printing and Direct Marketing Specialist with a side of design, photo, wordpress, hockey, rock, and ranch dressing. Publish PrintedProof.com

printedproof.com

4. Philippe Thronte • @lipelip

Hi I’m a webdesigner from Belgium
lipelip.be

5. Steve Robillard • @srpsco

diggerdesignlabs.com

**I’ve got nothing. No twitter profile or site. Steve where do you reside online?**

Again congrats to all the winners! You should love SixCentral.

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Six Central App Giveaway Winners

How:

Comment below, follow @fuelyourapps & @SixCentral and tweet your reason for why you want a free SixCentral account. Is it the stunning UI? Is it going to make your life easier? Do you just want one because? Make sure you tag your tweets with #FYA so we can track them.

Example:

I really, really, really, really want a @SixCentral account for free. #FYA

When:

Contest Ends Wednesday September 9th

Go ahead and tweet it. Tweet it once a day or once an hour. We at FYA will randomly choose people (we have a program for it) and the winners will be notified. So please comment, leave your email address and tweet you reason for wanting the freebies.

What:

5 Unlimited Six Central subscriptions. Found on SixCentral.com

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Six Central Account Giveaway

I have setup multiple apps that I run like this but one of my favorites is Instapaper. If you’re like me you have 65 tabs open in your browser and you sometimes need to clear those out and check them later. Instapaper is an app that lets you add the links to their service through an applet and then you can look at them later. Great! So now I can get rid of my 65 tabs in firefox and be more productive because I don’t have all of these other distractions.

Video How-To

Resources

Instapaper

Fluid App

Instapaper Restyled

credit to finding this add-on to TimVanDamme Site | Twitter

Fluid Icons Flickr Group

Free Menubar Icon

instapapertif

This is designed by me (chadengle) I am giving this icon away free for whatever you wish. Did you end up using the icon? Take a screen cap and add it to our flickr group.

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Using Menu Extra SSB’s for Better Productivity

1. Launchy combined with AutoHotKey

I love quicksilver on mac but have yet to find a single comparable app for windows. The best solution I’ve found so far is using Launchy in conjunction with AutoHotKey. If any readers have a better solution please feel free to leave a comment and let me know.

AutoHotKey lets you create custom hotkeys for launching programs and opening files as well as create better keyboard, joystick and mouse macros to handle repetitive tasks. For all of your other application launching needs, as well as a range of other options, there is Launchy. To get the most out of Launchy I highly recommend Take Launchy Beyond Application Launching.

2. Foxit Reader

I have a pretty fast computer and it still takes a minute for Adobe Acrobat to open a .pdf file. For much quicker PDF viewing, I highly recommend Foxit instead. Foxit is small and fast and uses a very small amount of your system resources and even lets you annotate the file you’re reading. Some advantages of Foxit Reader:

• Incredibly small: The download size of Foxit Reader is just a fraction of Acrobat Reader 20 M size.
• Breezing-fast: When you run Foxit Reader, it launches instantly without any delay. You are not forced to view an annoying splash window displaying company logo, author names, etc.
• Annotation tool: Have you ever wished to annotate (or comment on) a PDF document when you are reading it? Foxit Reader allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document.
• Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file.
• High security and privacy: Foxit Reader highly respects the security and privacy of users and will never connect to the Internet without users’ permission. While other PDF readers often silently connect to the Internet in the background. Foxit PDF Reader does not contain any spyware

3. Google Services

I’m talking about a number of the services Google offers here. Mainly Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. I love having all of this info at my fingertips regardless of where I am or what computer I’m on. I would honestly be completely lost without these outstanding web apps.

Google Calendar is a must to help me keep myself organized. With Google Calendar you can set recurring or one-time appointments and tasks, have different colored tags to help keep different kinds of tasks straight, and import any of your Remember the Milk lists for full integration into your calendar. You can also set up email or text alerts to remind you about upcoming events.

Google Docs is a free, online office suite. I love it because I have access to my docs anywhere and on any computer and it also keeps me from having to have an office suite on my hard drive. I’m not a fan of MS Office due to it’s pricetag and I’m not a fan of Open Office because it’s such a resource hog. I have yet to come across anything that Google Docs can’t handle including opening and exporting a document with pretty much any doc type you could need.

Gmail is simply an amazing email client that allows you to access any of your email accounts, from anywhere with any computer. Zen Habits has a terrific article on on how you can Turn Gmail into your Ultimate Productivity Center.

4. RescueTime

Rescue Time is a productive freelancer’s best friend and a lazy freelancer’s worst enemy. Once installed it keeps track of everything you do on your computer as well as tracking every website you visit if you use Firefox. Getting weekly reports on exactly how you spend every second of your time can be a real eye opener and show you exactly how productive you’re being (or not being in some cases). I’ve also found it to be very helpful when I start getting off track in pointing out how unproductive I’m being giving me a gentle nudge to work more and play less.

5. Toggl

While rescue time is great for letting you know how and where you’re spending your time, you’ll still need a time tracking app that you can edit and control for your projects. For instance, knowing that you spent 20 hours this week in your text editor won’t help you when you need to know how long you worked on individual projects. That’s where Toggl comes in.

Toggl is an online time tracking application that is very quick and easy to set up and allows you to track the time you spend on your projects with just a couple of mouse clicks.

6. Mind42

I usually try to take a couple of hours out of each week just to sit down and brainstorm. Mind mapping is a great way to do this and Mind42 is a wonderful free online mind mapping application. If you don’t know what mind mapping is you really don’t know what you’re missing out on. The next time you’re struggling for ideas, go read the Wikipedia article on mind mapping and give it a try.

Mind42.com is a browser based online mind mapping application. With Mind42.com installing mindmapping tools is no longer needed – for a hassle-free mindmapping experience. Just open the browser and launch the application when needed.

7. Memento

I’m an avid note jotter and Memento is the first app that took over my regular pen & notebook. Note that while Vista isn’t listed as a supported OS, I’ve been using it for months with no problems.

Here are some of Memento’s key features:

• You can choose each individual note’s color and size.
• All notes are automatically saved every minute
• New notes always open on top of other windows
• When you close Memento it saves the current configuration so that when you reopen the program, notes are exactly as they were when you closed it.

8. VirtuaWin

One of the things I really miss when I have to work in windows instead of linux is multiple desktops. They save so much time when you have to have multiple programs open at the same time. I’ve tried a few different applications that are meant to serve this purpose but none have been as consistantly stable as VirtuaWin.

VirtuaWin allows you to have up to 9 different desktops, each of which can be highly customized. The basic app is small and fast without any unnecessary features. However, you can install modules for any added features you might need making this a fairly powerful application.

9. Remember the Milk

I make to-do lists like I jot down notes so I need a great GTD (Getting Things Done) application to keep me sane. I’ve tried many different apps on multiple operating systems and, while I really enjoy some, I have yet to find one as complete as Remember the Milk. And when combined with Google Calendar, you have a scheduling tool that’s not to be underestimated.

Remember the Milk is a must have application for any list lover!

10. Picasa

Even though I use photoshop for major projects, I really like picasa as both an image manager and to do simple tasks such as editing images for my blog. It also comes with Picasa Photo Viewer, a gorgeous and fast image previewer.

The photo viewer is a fast, lightweight application for viewing images on your desktop or through Windows Explorer. Installed with Picasa 3, it lets you to take a quick look at images without having to fully open the Picasa 3 program.

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10 Free Apps to Fuel your Productivity

Background:

Last month, we held our very first How to Build a Web App Business Workshop at FreshBooks Headquarters and it went swimmingly! Entrepreneurs from across Canada and the United States joined our CEO and co-founder, Mike McDerment to learn from his experience building and running our service. And since many of you missed the opportunity to join us here, we wanted to do a repeat to make sure we weren’t leaving anybody out!

So, join us on Tuesday, June 16, 2009, for an intimate How to Build a Web App workshop at FreshBooks HQ in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Seating is limited to 40 people and the cost is $100. Lunch will be provided.

Mike will address many of the questions you have as entrepreneurs through topics such as:

• Building – your web app, your company your team
• Marketing – with and without dollars
• Product management – so you know what’s right to build
• Metrics – to track your progress
• Financing – the who, what, when, where, why and how 5Ws of fund raising

There’s a guaranteed a spot for any out of towners (well, outside Ontario-ers) who want to attend.

The Details:

What: How to Build a Web App workshop lead by FreshBooks CEO Mike McDerment
Where: FreshBooks HQ (2770 Dufferin St., Suite 201, Toronto, Ont., Canada)
When: Tuesday, June 16, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
How much: $100 per person
Site: buildingawebapp2.eventbrite.com

What Do I Win?

• A free ticket to Building App Business Workshop.

How Do I Win?

One commenter who follows @fuelyourapps will be chosen at random. *Make sure you follow and come back here to leave a comment to win!

Details about the Host of the Workshop:

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Giveaway: How to Build a Web App Business Workshop