Pixelmatrix Design

Some Late Announcements

Well, if you haven’t noticed already, the blog has been a bit quiet over the last month or so. I’ve been extremely busy with work, and launching 3 2.5 side projects! I wanted to talk a little bit about each of these projects just in case you haven’t heard of them yet.

TweetPeek

First things first. In early March, Michael Richardson of GeekFire and I launched TweetPeek, a service for creating a group twitter feed for whatever purpose.

The idea is that you can easily create a page that contains updates from a select group of people (most common uses would be for small companies, communities/groups, and friends).

This all got started from the Pulse of PDX website. Pulse of PDX is a website that shows you tweets from people in Portland. Soon after, Pulse of Open Source was created for people to see what’s going on in the realm of Open Source. We noticed that these groups were getting sort of popular, so Michael (who was responsible for the code being used on these sites) wrote some more code to make it extensible to everyone. Shortly thereafter, I came around and worked on the design for it. We’ve still got a long way to go with it, but it’s definitely a great start.

UI Candy

UI Candy is my attempt to create an icon store. For a very long time i’ve wanted to create a store, but I didn’t want to just do something that’s already been done before. Icon stores are very common, and while each one has a unique style, in most cases they are all very similar, and for the same purposes.

After talking with several mac developers, including Wade Cosgrove of Everyday Software, I determined that there was a definite need for common glyphs, and ui components that everyone needed, yet no one seemed to have. I set out to solve that problem.

UI Candy has been pretty successful so far, and I hope it will continue to be in the future. I am definitely going to work on more items for the store because I don’t think the problem can be solved with just one set of icons.

Bacon-omatic

Bacon-omatic is definitely the silliest site i’ve ever made, and arguably one of the most pointless sites on the internet. It started out as a joke between a few people here in Portland (over twitter), and has recently spread to become a symbol.

Bacon-omatic was created to automatically make your text “Wrapped in bacon good” by wrapping it in