Monday, June 1, 2009

What Goes Into A GUI Software App

Ok, besides planning, coding, testing? Like, GUI things perhaps (oh ya, you know this is going to be a long battle for me to get something up and running, but one can try).

While planning a non-iPhone project (ok, well non-iPhone application project) I wanted some artwork but said to myself, "Self, this is something that would eat up hours as you try to recreate the wheel to make some iPod icons, let's search the net." Google...iPod icons...searching...bing!

I turned up some good sites, but in particular I liked IconArchive. I will be revisiting this site often as I need icons and sprites for some of my projects. The site had a good selection of iPod icons which fit the bill for my other project and there are a large selection of icons I can use for some other iPhone apps if they get out of my brain and into something working and ready for beta. Bonus here is that some of the icons are available free for non-commercial projects so you can give them a try before you buy the license if your project gets off the ground and is ready for the App Store.

Being a T-Shirt Junkie, I was thrilled today to get an email from Threadless that said they were having a $5 Tees sale. Sweet!! Ok, what does that have to do with content for an app? Well, the Type Tees (t-shirt with just text on it) have a link to the font used for the T. Bingo!! If you want to polish your app, how about a little custom font work? This will come in handy for several of my projects (a board game and the main iPhone app I am working on). The two sites which had fonts I can use at a reasonable price are Blambot and T.26.

Another set of mostly Freeware fonts I found which have a couple I am interested in are at The Cumberland Fontworks. There are lots of interesting fonts here what would be useful for several genres of games.

As the work on multiple projects unfolds and learn more and more about the items required to build a physical board game, design an engaging website, and make an iPhone game. Artwork in the form of fonts, icons, and sprites, just being a few.

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