An app may be well built, and can do a job well, but if it’s icon looks anything less than stellar then it can let the user experience down.

Beautiful, well designed app icons can help the app to stand out, and can ensure the app get’s a spot on the taskbar, or on the iPhone and iPad screen, where it deserves.

We’ve selected a showcase of beautifully designed app icons that look and feel at home on the sleek interface of OS X or iOS.

Sparrow

Sparrow’s icon stands out on the taskbar as it’s so clear and simple, but at the same time it puts across exactly what the app is about – sending emails (or letters, as the icon displays) quickly and easily.

Things for Mac

Things for Mac has a beautifully designed icon, an impressively detailed rendering of a note tray. Pay attention to the accurate use of lighting, and even the curved shadow at the back of the tray – it’s clearly been designed with a strong attention to detail.

Github for Mac

Github for Mac’s icon oozes personality with the site’s mascot (the Octocat) opening a box of magic, much like opening up amazing software.

Cyberduck

Cyberduck, a well known and loved FTP client available for Windows & Mac, uses it’s trademark rubber duck mascot as it’s app icon – making it immediately recognizable when quickly scanning through the taskbar.

Coda

Coda is an all-in-one text editor and terminal that marks up code beautifully and is built by the same team that made Transmit. It’s icon, the Coda leaf, is amazingly detailed – it’s not until the icon is blown up to a larger size that you can see the tiny creases in the leaf, and the hairs on the stem of the plant.

Flipboard for iPad

Flipboard for iPad has an icon which, brilliantly, uses opacity to show the paper that forms the F has been folded out (or flipped out) similar to the way articles and blog posts are flipped over in the app.

Pomodoro for Mac

Pomodoro for Mac uses a beautifully detailed 3D rendering of the world famous kitchen timer – the attention to detail when it’s so large helps to produce a realistic looking pomodoro timer when shrunk down to the taskbar.

Apple Time Machine

Apple’s love of design is frequently praised, and with examples like their Time Machine icon it’s easy to see why. The reverse arrow on the clock is a clever nod to the fact that you can retrieve files and folders from the past, and the background appearance of rushing through space reflects how Time Machine appears when you navigate through different dates in OS X Lion.

Skitch

Skitch, a screenshot editor, has a beautifully designed icon which really stands out in the taskbar, looking unlike any other icon that’s out there.

Alfred

Alfred, a replacement for Apple’s spotlight tool, takes on the role of a butler, searching your files and folders for whatever you ask of it—the bowler hat and magnifying glass are beautifully detailed and the icon itself fits with the app’s personality perfectly.

Chrome

There were some complaints when Google changed the Chrome icon from the 3D globe rendering to the much more simplified, 2D image—but with time the complaints have died down somewhat. Personally, I love the simple, colorful icon which looks at home on the taskbar and is easy to spot from a mile away.

Tweetbot

Another icon that’s full of personality, Tweetbot is an iPhone Twitter client built by Tapbots. The icon, a robotic version of the famous Twitter bird, fits in well with the other Tapbots apps as well as having an interesting and unusual style.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s HTML5 app (which you can add to the homescreen of iOS devices, rather than being a downloadable app) uses their Basecamp icon – it’s instantly recognizable to users of Basecamp, it’s clear and unfussy and because they use Apple’s “apple-touch-icon” spec to display the large icon instead of just a favicon or screenshot of the homepage, the icon looks perfectly at home.

Camera+

The designed of the icon for Camera+, a camera app for iPhone, had a thorough attention to detail, from the leather effect of the outer side of the icon to the colorful lighting effects on the lens and the shading and lighting of the metal ring, the icon is perfectly designed.

Wunderlist

The Wunderlist app (a task manager similar to Things) has a gorgeously decorative app icon, with an angled view of a tray of notes covered by the Wunderlist ribbon. There’s a lot to love about the icon – from the lighting effects on the chiseled edge of the wood block to the subtle texture of the ribbon, Wunderlist get’s their icon just right – it’s intricately detailed, looks great and it carries their branding beautifully.

Alex writes for printing company Print Express, who specialize in business cards, flyers & postcard printing. In his spare time he practices with Photoshop and coding with Ruby on Rails.

Are there any app icons that you think deserve a mention? Let us know in the comments.

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One of the long-standing complaints about Macs is that there are more limited software options than for Windows-based PCs.

While the gap has closed in recent years as Macs become more popular (and let’s face it: there are some awesome Mac-only programs that PC owners are rightfully jealous of), there are still programs you can only run on a PC.

And even if the programs you want are available for the Mac, what if you already have Windows licenses for them? Do you really want to spend hundreds of dollars on buying the exact same version of your software, just for a different platform? Can you even afford to do that? Probably not.

Sure, you could use Bootcamp, but that means every time you want to run a Windows program, you’ll need to reboot your Mac. Not the most ideal solution if you’re in the middle of a project. Especially if you use a mix of Mac and PC programs for your work. This is where Parallels comes in…

Parallels lets you run Windows programs on your Mac, as if they were native programs, without a reboot. Instead, it creates a virtual machine within your Mac where you can install a (separately-purchased) copy of Windows. From there, you have the option to view your Windows desktop and programs within a single window on your Mac, or you can set it up to show your Windows programs natively within your Mac environment.

Developers and designers should be especially interested in this, because it means that they don’t need to keep two systems up and running for testing (or rely on third-party testing services). Just run whatever version of Windows you want with Parallels and test in Internet Explorer or Windows versions of other browsers without any hassle.

Parallels 7 has just been released, and adds a number of new features. First on the list for many is likely integration with Mac OS 10.7 Lion, which includes full-screen support, use of the Launchpad for Windows applications, Mission Control support, and more. Parallels also has a new, more Mac-like appearance and functionality, including setting preferences immediately without having to click OK.

The Parallels Wizard makes it easy to set up your virtual machines, and even includes the ability to download Chromium OS, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu Linux for free, or purchase and download Windows 7 (you can also install Windows 7 from a DVD or image file, or migrate from a Windows PC).

Another big feature that’s been added is the ability to share your iSight or FaceTime HD camera with Windows applications, including Windows Live Messenger, while also being available to OS X programs at the same time. Printing has been streamlined, too, so that it’s possible to print from your Mac OS printers from within a Windows program.

Other improvements include faster boot times, faster pause and resume within Windows, and faster migration of your PC data. Overall, Parallels 7 is about 60% faster than Parallels 6 was.

You can also now choose up to 1GB of video memory to make graphically intensive Windows programs run smoother. There are enhanced 3D graphics for gaming (up to 45% faster than with Parallels 6), plus 7.1 surround sound and support for high-quality audio formats (up to 192KHz). And there are plenty of reports from gamers online that Parallels 7 makes it possible to play games that Parallels 6 couldn’t handle.

Another advantage to Parallels is that you can also run multiple versions of OS X within the virtual machines on your Mac. For example, you could run OS X Lion along with Snow Leopard Server if you needed to, without having to reboot your computer to switch between the two. This is another huge potential advantage for developers.

The new Parallels mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are also a great addition. Currently $4.99 (the regular price is $19.99, so get it while it’s on sale), the mobile app will effectively let you run Windows (or whatever OS you’re virtualizing) on your phone or iPad, even including Flash content. You can even copy and paste text directly from your mobile to your virtualized machine with the app!

The full version of Parallels 7 is $79.99, though the student version is only $39.99. An upgrade from Parallels 5 or 6 will set you back $49.99. You’ll need to buy a copy of Windows if you don’t already have one, though Parallels 7 makes it easy to purchase and install the newest version of Windows directly from within the program.

Reviewed exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman

[Disclaimer: This post is a sponsored post for Parallels. The opinions expressed in the article are the author's only.]

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Any time you’re working in a team environment, it’s likely you’ll need a series of permissions and approvals for various stages of your project.

Managing all these approvals, making sure that they’re done on time, and making sure that the right versions of everything are getting passed along to the right people can be a headache for even the most organized of project managers.

Add into the team mix approvals from clients and it becomes an even bigger hassle.

The truth is, a dedicated proofing and review system is pretty much a necessity for any designer working in a team environment. Without it, you run the risk of missing approvals from necessary team members, screwing up your entire project timeline.

Approval Manager is a great answer to this kind of situation.

With Approval Manager you can set up your projects and enter the teammates involved. Then, at each step of the project where approval is needed, you can automatically send proofs to the appropriate people.

Set deadlines (and have automated reminders emailed for current and past-due items on each member’s to-do list), custom brand your communications (necessary for presenting a professional image to clients and sub-contractors), and even compare previous versions.

Having a way to visually manage your approval system will save you tons of time. Forget about digging through your email archives trying to figure out if someone did or didn’t sign off on something. Just look it up in Approval Manager and instantly see the status and any notes for each team member and each proof iteration. Having records and an audit trail also makes it easy to figure out exactly what happened if any part of your project goes wrong.

Workflow templates make it even easier to use Approval Manager. There’s also a centralized contacts database and auto-routing of files so that proofs are moved through the various stages based on rules (or this can be done manually).

And Approval Manager has flexible deployment options, so you can host it with the company, in the cloud, or on your own servers. There’s also support for Adobe Publishing Workflow, so InDesign digital proofs can be reviewed and corrections can be made using InCopy rather than marking up PDFs.

The Express edition, which is free, will be suitable for a lot of teams. It includes unlimited proofs and users, browser review and mark-up tools, multi-person reviews, version tracking, and automatic email notifications.

If you need more features, you can buy the Standard edition, which has a one-time fee starting at $995. This includes everything in the Express edition, plus multi-stage workflow, workflow scheduling and dashboard, automated proof routing, and customizable branding.

If that’s still not enough and you want a complete project management system, you can upgrade to Workgroups 2011. This includes everything in the Standard edition, plus project and workflow management, digital asset management, financial productivity tools, complete reporting, a best practices consultation, and turnkey implementation.

Again, for a lot of teams, especially when sharing with outside clients isn’t necessary, the Express edition will cover everything you need. It’s almost certainly going to be an improvement over whatever you’re using now.

Learn more about Approval Manager

Reviewed exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review for Approval Manager. The opinions expressed in this post are solely the authors and weren’t influenced by Approval Manager.

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This time around, there are 13 items inside the bundle which are worth a whopping $780.

But fear not, the bundle sells for a mere $49.99 which translates to a whopping 93% discount!

This is a truly great bundle and probably one of their best so far with some really amazing design gems in an affordable package.

I think this is a great collection and an amazing value for any designer, and wait till you see what’s inside…

Check out all the design juice you can get out of BH4:

1. Snippets is a powerful application for Mac OS X that stores the most valuable pieces of code you can reuse in different projects many times.

2. ColorSchemer Studio 2 is a professional color-matching application for Mac OS X & WIN OSto help you build beautiful color schemes easily.

3. Layers is an outstanding screen Capture application for Mac OS X. Layers captures every Item on Your Screen as a PSD Layered Image.

4. ShoveBox is a is a Mac OS X application that catches all those little scraps of information that you can’t act on now but would rather not forget.

5. WPBundle are offering 3 WordPress themes of your choice. Every theme speak for themselves, built on top of the WooThemes Framework.

6. SmashingMagazine got you the newest 3 E-books in their store: Mastering Photoshop for Web Design, Volume 2, Professional Web Design Vol. 2 and Getting the Hang of Web Typography. The 3 e-books are available as PDF, ePUB, Mobipocket.

7. Symbolicons are a family of royalty-free vector icons and symbols for most any use. You get the complete set of 465 Icons.

8. Decompose is a Mac OS X application allowing an easy extraction of elements from pictures to use them to make composite images.

9. Tapptics is a collection of design files & step-by-step training created to help designers, developers & idea people save time and money creating mobile apps.

10.Picons‘s all 440 icons for BundleHunt users. Basic 1,2 are brand new icons set containing 440 hand-crafted vector icons, built on a grid and sharing the same visual language.

11.ThemeFuse are contributing with 3 WordPress Themes (3 themes of your Choice) with Standard license.

12.WeGraphics is a creative studio specialized into the creation of a large library of design elements such as vector art, textures, fonts, brushes, etc . 30 of their high quality sets
are included in the bundle.

13.IconJar : 211 Hand Crafted Icons for User Interface Designers.

By purchasing today, you will not only save a fortune but you will also be entered to win an iPad 2 (16GB/WiFi)!

The sale will last for only two weeks, and will end on May 31 at midnight (EST). For more information, be sure to visit BundleHunt.com

[Disclaimer: This was a sponsored review for Bundle Hunt.]

Never Ending WordPress Business Bundle – only $14!

This time, the bundle includes 20 great design items valued at over $1,200 and is now on sale for only $49.

The new bundle includes fantastic products such as the Pictos Icon Set, GoMedia Arsenal Ultimate Vector & Font Collections, WordPress themes from Press75, the newest Smashing Magazine eBook and a 3 month MultiSitePlan from WPEngine.

BundleHunt 3 was released yesterday and will be available for 14 days for $49 (regular price is $1,287).

What’s included

• Smashing eBook #5: E-Commerce: This e-book walks you through the preparation of your e-commerce projects.
• WPEngine: A 3 Month Multi Site Hosting Plan.
• GoMedia Arsenal includes their outstanding Ultimate Vector Collection 2 and the Ultimate Font Collection.
• Pictos Iconsets: Hand crafted, infinitely scalable & royalty-free Icons for UI designers. Includes Pictos 1, 2 and 3 + Pictos Font.
• VandelayPremier Pack: Offering high-quality textures, brushes, vectors, icons, PSDs, and career resources to make your life easier and your business more successful.
• BrushLovers: You get to choose 20 Premium Brush sets from their premium brush gallery.
• Code Collector Pro: A powerful Mac tool to organize, use and share code snippets.
• Relationship 2: Ideal for contact and project management on your Mac.
• Keynote Wireframe Toolkit: Gives you the building blocks to put together great looking prototypes in no time.
• Press75 contributing with 4 Premium WordPress Themes: Relay , Roundabout, ReCapture, OnDemand.
• ThemeTrust includes 2 of their newest themes: Filtered and Oracle.
• IconShelf Complete Set: Over 200+ high quality icons.

Bonus #1: Win an iPad!

This bundle not only saves you a ton of money, but you could also win you an iPad (16GB/WiFi) loaded with 5 best selling e-books for web designers and developers.

You must purchase the bundle to be entered into the contest to win this iPad.

Bonus #2: Tweet to Win

• 3 users who tweet about the bundle will be selected at random to win the 3 Bonus Items each day during the bundle period. No purchase is necessary.
• The 3 bonus items are: Business Icon Set (Worth $25) + 10 DepositPhotos Credit (Worth $500) + WPBids Theme (Worth $59)

BundleHunt 3 is offering the pack for 14 days only. The sale ends at midnight, EST on Feb 21st.

Head over to BundleHunt for more details and to check it all out.

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So we partnered with Mostash to create an exclusive infographic depicting the 20 most popular design tools, calculated using a ‘magic’ formula based on the results taken from three different popularity ranking websites.

We used the stats from Software Informer, Wakoopa and iUseThis. For the number of tweets per minute, that you’ll see below, we used the wonderful Twitter Tussle.

The artwork was done by Ricardo Cavolo (all credits appear at the bottom).

Surprised by the results? Some tools that we were expecting to see in the top 20 are actually way down below…

To view the infographic at a larger resolution, simply click on the image below. Feel free to comment and let us know what you think…

Credits: Software Informer, Wakoopa, iUseThis, TwitterTussle, Ricardo Cavolo, and Mostash

Never Ending WordPress Business Bundle – only $14!

Today, the Bundle Team has announce a brand new Bundle, called simply Bundle Hunt 2. I’m personally excited to see some great Mac apps, attractive icons and some professional fonts bundled all together in a really high quality package.

The new bundle is packed with even more applications at much higher discounts than before. As usual, Bundle Hunt delivers a high quality collection of goodies, including many Mac apps, fonts, WP themes and much more.

And there’s even a daily lucky draw for Twitter followers!

Here’s what’s included in the new bundle:

And here’s the complete list of all the products:

• CleanMyMac
• 8 High Quality Fonts from FontSpring
• 30 Premium Download Credits from Brusheezy or Vecteezy
• PCKeeper
• IconBoxApp
• Picturesque
• Berokyo:
• 3 WordPress Themes:
• 2 Tumblr Themes
• MiniOneRacing
• 3 Months (PLUS) at Vectorious
• 6 Months from GlassCubes
• 6 Months Team plan from RoninApp
• 6 Months Studio plan from Draftboard
• 3 month VPS1 plan or 6 Free Months of a hostPro + Turbo plan Site5 Host
• Designer’s Icon Set

The entire bundle is available today for a limited time only at the heavily discounted price of $49.99! (actual value is $2000!)

BundleHunt founder and spokesperson, Noura Yehia, explained this by saying, “We hunted more than two months for the most useful resources for web designers and developers and now we’re offering them for an incredibly low price. That’s the best deal in the history of bundles!”

BundleHunt is also offering a daily lucky draw to its customers who have a Twitter account wherein a winner chosen at random will be offered a second bundle for free for one of his/her friends.

More details are available on BundleHunt.com

[Disclaimer: This was a sponsored review for Bundle Hunt.]

Never Ending WordPress Business Bundle – only $14!

If you work with developers on the buildout and implementation of websites, the merge between front-end templates and back-end functionality can be a scary black hole.

Issues like overwrites, lost files, and the all-too-common “working off a previous version” phenomenon crop up constantly. And once back-end functionality has been put into your templates, you become terrified to touch them for fear of breaking something a developer spent a great deal of time getting to work.

In addition, even if you have a common repository that everyone is pulling from odds are at least one member of your team forgot to grab the latest files and is about to blow things up with their latest additions.

In this article, I’ll give you a quick review of Git, an excellent version control system.

Version Control – A Quick and Dirty Explanation

Version Control (also known as Revision Control or Source Control Management) is a great way to solve the file sharing problem.

The basic concept is this: there is one main repository for all of the project files. Team members check files out, make changes, and then check them back in (or commit them). The Version Control System (VCS) automatically notes who changed the files, when they were changed, and what about them was new or different.

It also asks you to write a little note about the change so everyone on the project knows at a glance what you did and why. Each file will then have a revision history so you can easily go back to a previous version of any file if something goes horribly wrong.

A good VCS also allows you to merge changes to the same file. If you and another person work locally on the same file at the same time, when you push these files back into the main repository the system will merge both sets of changes to create a new and fully up-to-date file. If any conflicts arise during the merge it will highlight them for you.

You’re probably using a very crude VCS right now to keep your files straight. If you’re a designer, it looks something like this:

Designer Version Control - FAIL

This works well enough for PSDs and other large binary files, which don’t really lend themselves to VCS. But there’s a much better way to do it when you are managing the source code for a website.

Benefits to using a Version Control System include:

• Files cannot be overwritten
• There is a common repository that holds all the latest files
• People can work on the same files simultaneously without conflict
• Allows you to revert back to an older version of the file/project if needed
• Making your developers very happy

Even if you don’t work with a team, version control can be a lifesaver. Backing up files is one of the easiest things you can do to save yourself from losing work or having to start over.

The idea of a VCS seems daunting at first, especially since most of the documentation is written by and for developers. But once you make the move to incorporate it into your workflow, you’ll find it’s not nearly as hard as it looks.

Meet Git

OK, so now you can see why a Version Control System is a must-have for your web team. If you do a little Googling you’ll see that there are quite a few options out there including SVN, Mercurial, CVS, Bazaar and Git. Any one of them could be a good solution for your needs, and I encourage you to do some research before selecting a VCS. In this article I’m going to focus on Git, the one I use daily. It’s a “rising star” that has gained popularity thanks to a strong Linux fanbase, GitHub and the Rails community.

Git is a free open-source Version Control System originally created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernal development. Linus is a very smart guy; when he sets out to solve a problem, he doesn’t mess around. One of Git’s big differentiators is that unlike SVN and CVS it is a distributed version control system. This means that every user has a complete copy of the repository data stored locally on their machine. What’s so great about that? A few things:

• Everything is local, so you can work offline
• There is no single point of failure. It doesn’t rely on one central server that could crash and burn, taking the only repository for your project with it.
• Because it doesn’t have to communicate with a central server constantly, processes run much faster

Git has a slightly tougher learning curve than SVN, but the tradeoff is worth it. Just think how impressed your developer friends will be when you tell them you’re using the new hotness that is Git! In all seriousness, I don’t think the learning curve is all that steep. SVN was equally confusing for me at the start, and I ran into more day-to-day problems when using it.

Installing Git isn’t fun and games. I was lucky to have a knowledgeable developer willing to help, but there are plenty of resources online to get you through it. It will run on a PC, Mac or Linux box, although installation for Linux and OSX is considerable easier than for Windows.

You can download the latest version of Git here Once you have the files, try this quick guide to get you started with the installation process. For Windows users, this step-by-step visual guide should be helpful. Mac users, try this guide found on GitHub

Getting Started

Once you have Git installed, you can create your repository. To turn an existing folder into a Git repository, use the following commands in your Terminal or Command Prompt window:

cd path/to/project
git init
git add .
git commit

What you’re telling Git to do is:

• Initialize this directory
• Add everything in it – all files and subdirectories
• Commit or store, all current changes in the repository

If you hate the command line you can also do this using the Git GUI. It’s not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but it’s there if you need it.

A Sample Git Workflow

I’m currently using Git on a Mac to work on a web application with multiple web developers. We have a “master” version of the code that we push our files to, and we each run a full copy locally. On any given day, my workflow goes something like this:

1. Fire up Terminal. Start up my local mysql database (so the application we’re building can run locally on my machine).
2. Use Terminal to check out the latest changes by using the “git pull” command. This gets me all the changes made by other team members and checked into our master repository.
3. Open the project in TextMate and make my changes.
4. Commit changes and add my notes. This only commits them locally. I commit frequently, probably ten or more times a day. This helps keep me on track.
5. Push my changes to the master repository using “git push”. Now other team members can check out and see my changes. You should do this at least once a day or after any major addition.

All of these actions can be done easily through the Terminal window, but I’m a visual kind of girl. For that reason, I use GitX, a Git gui for OSX, to make my commits. I still push and pull through Terminal, but GitX makes it easy for me to organize my commits and wrap my head around what I’m doing.

At the top, it highlights what change was made to the files. In the lower left is your list of Unstaged Changes. To commit them, you drag one or more files to the “Staged Changes” area on the right, type in your commit message, and hit the Commit button.

If I flip to the tree view, I can see what has been pushed to the repository. If my files were not current with the master files, the green and blue tags at the top would be out of sync. GitNub offers a similar Mac-style interface.

There’s also a great TextMate bundle available. With it, you can push, pull, commit, and more without ever leaving TextMate. It’s extremely efficient.

Learn More

Git Cheat Sheet

Above: Zack Rusin’s Git Cheat Sheet

I’m still a newbie to Git myself, so I’ve only scratched the surface as to what you can do with it, but I’ve definitely seen the light when it comes to version control, and am glad I finally got on the bandwagon.

To learn more about using Git, check out these great resources:

Intros To Git

Getting To Know Git
Wikipedia entry on Git
Why Git Is Better Than X
Linus Torvald’s TED talk on Git
A Tour of Git: The Basics
Git Ready

Cheat Sheets/Tips

37 Signals Git Resources
Git For The Lazy
The Git User Manual
A Gaggle of Git Tips
GitHub’s Git Cheat Sheet
Git Magic

Intros to Version Control

Version Control For Designers
A Visual Guide to Version Control
Wikipedia entry on Revision Control
Choosing a Distributed Version Control System
I Wonder What This Button Does (A List Apart)

Written exclusively for WDD by Mindy Wagner. She is a web designer at Viget Labs and has worked in both print and web design for over 8 years. She has a degree in Electronic Media Art and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Do you use Git or other software for version control? Please share your experience with us!

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