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The guys from Zurb just launched a free version of notableapp.com called Bounce App.

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An important part of having a successful app is having a well thought out interface and icon design. In order to do that it is important to see what other people have done and where to find resources to make the best icon/interface possible. In order to do so FYA is going to release a series of “design” related posts geared towards interface and icon design. These posts will break down the designs, show where to find inspiration as well as give your great resources to learn from the great icons that have already been established so you to can make your app have an amazingly effective user interface as well as a stunning icon design. These are few resources to get you started on your icon & interface design journey.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Aqua offers a photo-illustrative icon style—it approaches the realism of photography but uses the features of illustrations to convey a lot of information in a small space. Icons can be represented in 512 x 512 pixels to allow ample room for detail. Anti-aliasing makes curves and nonrectilinear lines possible. Alpha channels and translucency allow for complex shading and dimensionality. All of these qualities allow you to create lush, vibrant icons that capture the user’s attention.

40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icon Designs

As icons appear in larger sizes through appearances in Mac applications and rich user interfaces the icon designs themselves are becoming more and more detailed. Check out this collection of 40 of the best icon design tutorials from across the web, each covering the process of designing a highly detailed icon graphic in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

Designing a good interface isn’t easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology — web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices — may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques, and examples presented revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book’s assumptions, such as “We don’t read pages–we scan them” and “We don’t figure out how things work–we muddle through.” Coming to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces topnotch sites.

42 Amazing Photoshop and Illustrator Icon Design Tutorials
This article is a compilation of the best Icon Design Tutorials, I think everyone will be able to learn something new from these tutorials.

The title should have been 41 Amazing Photoshop and Illustrator Icon Design Tutorials and also not Forgetting the Single Gimp Icon Design Tutorial. (A little long, don’t you think).user’s attention.

30 iPhone Apps with Sexy Interfaces -

The iPhone is a wonderfully designed device, sporting sleek curves and oozing minimalism. Fortunately, the great design doesn’t need to stop there. Ever since the App Store went live, we’ve seen some incredibly attractive software released for the platform..

[Fireside Chat] Icon designers (Part 1 of 3)

This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals

We want to take a closer look at the design of iPhone applications and showcase some good and bad examples, best practices as well as useful ideas and recommendations for your next iPhone app design. This article is a first post of a new series related to the design of iPhone applications.

10 Tips for Effective Icon Design

We Love Icons:

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.

10 Mistakes in Icon Design

It is much easier to criticize somebody else’s work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16×16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design…

25+ Fresh Icon Designers & UI Ninjas

We recently needed an icon designer for a quick job and it was far more time consuming that we thought to find a good freelancer portfolio for this kind of work. So we spent a few more hours and came up with this awesome list of icon designers and UI professionals.

Icon Resource:

Let yourself be taken by the hand through the world of visual interface design, and learn how to design icons for your own application, website, or company. Here a few reasons why it’s worth checking out; Learn all and even more about icon design in full HD quality Quicktime format movies.Icon Resource provides iPhone / iPod ready videos to load into iTunes and watch on the road.

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We have extended our FYA reach into two other Social Mediums! Why is this cool?

Flickr:

Upload screenshots of your favorite apps and show them off! Then you can tag the photo and tell what parts of the interface you love and hate. This will allow other users to “see” what is going on, on other people’s computers. There may also be some secret screenshots of apps that FYA is beta testing. Another reason to join the Flickr group is that you can now use it instead of twitpic to tweet images to twitter. What could be better?

Facebook:

Connect with the real people behind the FUEL accounts you know and love. Some sites are one dimensional and facebook actually allows you to see more images than an avatar of that person.

So go ahead give the FYA groups your membership so we can connect in other mediums.

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I did a light review of Fluid App earlier in our site and I am going to expand on what I use Fluid for on a daily basis. Fluid is a Mac app that allows you to turn a webpage into its own application. This is great for things like gmail, facebook, twitter, Basecamp, Mint, Google Analytics and Google Reader to name just a few the possiblities with this app are honestly endless. Today we are goingt look into the Menu Extra SSB which lets you make an app that resides in your menu bar.

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

[vimeo clip_id="5370519" width="600" height="375"]

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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As a freelancer, good productivity is a really big deal to me. I’m constantly on the lookout for apps that will add a little fuel to my productivity fire. This is the list of 10 productivity boosting apps that I simply could not live without.

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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While running through the app-store you can become bombarded with all kinds of imagery. I picked 8 (there are tons not everyone can be featured in this post, I am sorry) that I thought were creative and interesting.

Tipulator

Take the guesswork out of restaurant tipping. Enter the bill amount, select a percentage, and Tipulator will calculate the tip. And it’ll split the check among friends.Use Tipulator with your iPhone or iPod touch the next time you go out to dinner. Your dining partners will be curiously fascinated with your cute new tip calculator.

Site | iTunes

Flickit

Keep your Flickr photostream up to date while you’re on the go! Upload and tag batches of photos using Flickit’s super-fast uploading engine and streamlined interface.

• Add photos from your iPhone library or take new shots directly with the camera
• Batch upload multiple photos
• Edit standard Flickr metadata such as title, description, and privacy settings
• Assign Tags and create new tags
• Assign Sets
• Tag photos with geolocation coordinates

Site | iTunes

Things

Things is a beautifully focused and amazingly intuitive task manager. Other task managers either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Either way you are not getting stuff done. Things instead has the right balance between ease of use and powerful features. You can even sync wirelessly with the desktop version of Things using Wi-Fi.

Site | iTunes

WeightBot

Whether you are trying to lose (or gain) a few pounds, tracking your weight has never been more fun. Set your goal weight, record your weight at any interval (one weight per day max), view your BMI, and see your progress on a beautiful graph. Weightbot also has a built-in secure password feature to protect your weight from prying eyes. It’s easy to use, surprisingly addicting, and designed for everyone to enjoy. Even if you are not actively dieting, you will love tracking your weight just to use Weightbot.

Site | iTunes

MouthOff

MouthOff will have your mates in fits of laughter – pull it out over dinner with friends or in a business meeting to lighten the mood, use it to deliver an important message or tell someone you love them – the possibilities are endless!

Site | iTunes

Twinkle

Discover, connect, and send messages to people nearby. Upload photos and update your Twitter account. Contact old friends and make new ones, all with Twinkle, the location-aware network for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
NEW: Twinkle 1.4 is now out, featuring a landscape map feed, a built-in minibrowser, blocking and lots of other cool new tricks.

Site | iTunes

LEDit

LEDit is a led screen ticker emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. LEDit is great to say something to your friends when they can’t hear you, such as at the disco, in class, in business meetings, etc. All you have to do is type your message and hit the ‘display message’ button and LEDit will scroll your message on the screen.

Site | iTunes

FontShuffle

Wouldn’t it be great if a whole font cat­a­logue would fit into your shirt pocket? If you could find a type­face with­out know­ing its name, just by com­par­ing its shapes? If it were pos­si­ble to e-mail the mar­ket­ing depart­ment your desired type­face for a client pre­sen­ta­tion while still at the airport?

Site | iTunes