The Breakroom • A blog for the Iconfactory

The Year In Review for 2024

December 23, 2024

As we enter our 29th year in business (holy cow!) we once again turn to look back at where we’ve been and, of course, where we’re headed. This past year has been full of discoveries, challenges, and change.

We kicked the year off with a much-needed re-design of Iconfactory.com, bringing our app design services for clients into focus. The new site showcases our collective expertise in user interface design and branding, helping us connect with fellow developers who are looking to stand out in a crowded App Store. The re-designed site was a catalyst for new work in 2024 and reminded us of our passion for helping clients launch, re-imagine, and brand amazing apps.

Up, Up & Away!

This past year saw updates to several of our software products. In March we released a new version of Linea Sketch, adding the ability to quickly customize background and canvas colors. In August, we added support for the Apple Pencil Pro, and that’s changed the way we draw and create in Linea Sketch. In the coming year we’re looking forward to finding out if the rumors of a larger, foldable iPad are true, and what that may mean for Linea’s future.

In April we introduced a helpful and groundbreaking update to iPulse, our system monitoring app for iOS. iPulse 1.1 uses Apple’s picture-in-picture technology to give you a real-time glance at what’s happening behind the scenes on your iPhone or iPad.

iPulse’s picture-in-picture gauges give you a unique view under the hood of iOS.

iPulse lets you track processors, network, memory, and storage space as they are constantly monitored and displayed in a convenient graph that floats above everything else on the screen. It’s is a great way to troubleshoot problems and get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening behind the scenes on both macOS and iOS.

The Year of Tapestry

If we could sum up 2024 in a single word it would have to be “Tapestry”. Bringing our new social media app to life has been our primary focus and driving force this year. The vision of Project Tapestry began with the Kickstarter back in January, which was quickly funded by March. Since then, we’ve been working each and every week to realize the promise of a unified, chronological timeline for all your favorite Internet content.

From the outset we knew that Tapestry’s potential would be one of the biggest development challenges we’ve faced, and unsurprisingly, we were right. There’s a saying we toss around on Slack – “If it’s easy, it ain’t Tapestry™”. From its complex user interface design to syncing content across disparate social and internet services, Tapestry has continually asked us to rise to the challenge.

Despite this, we’ve had tons of fun bringing it to life and have been delighted for Fridays when the weekly TestFlight builds go out to happy Kickstarter backers. We also enjoyed pushing tens of thousands of pixels for the portraits we delivered throughout the year; delivering the last ones to patient supporters just this past week.

We’re in the Tapestry homestretch now and proud of what we’ve spent the year creating. We sincerely hope you’ll check it out when it comes to the App Store in early 2025. Stay tuned just a little bit longer!

The Road Ahead

As we journey into the new year, we’re very much looking forward to launching Tapestry as well as updating our other apps that have been patiently waiting in the wings. We’ll also be releasing new wallpapers for Wallaroo and Patreon each and every week just as we did in 2024. If you’re looking for a last minute gift, year’s worth of wallpapers for that special someone might fit the bill!

We look forward to continuing our work with clients old and new to help them create beautifully designed apps, icons, and promo images. Like the rest of you, we don’t know what 2025 holds for us, but we’re excited to find out. We hope you’ll join us, once again, as we venture into that undiscovered country together. Stay well and happy holidays, everyone!

Sketch Your Heart Out This October with Linea’s 50% Off Sale

October 8, 2024

By Ged Maheux

With Inktober now in full swing, we thought it would be a great time for users to take nearly 50% off Linea’s annual subscription price. If you love to draw, sketch, or even just doodle, Linea makes the perfect companion – and now through the end of October, you get half off when you subscribe.

Linea makes sketching fun and easy, and puts your focus on quickly bringing ideas to life. Inktober’s daily drawing prompts are a great, low-key way to explore the app’s features including ZipShapes, texture layers, realistic brushes, and much more. Linea also comes with scores of helpful video tutorials built right into the app or on YouTube to help you get started in a snap.

Here are just a few examples of what folks have created with their iPads, Apple Pencil, and Linea Sketch:

Linea also creates time-lapse recordings as you draw. These short videos are a great way to pull back the curtain and share your creative process on social media, or directly with friends and family.

Whether you’re a seasoned artist or a budding novice, Linea is a great way to draw and explore your creativity! Click this link on your iPhone or iPad to take nearly 50% off the annual subscription cost of Linea Sketch. But don’t wait, we’re only making this promotion available to a limited number of users and only through the end of October.

There’s never been a better time to join in on the drawing fun!

Get Eight Legs Up on Inktober with Linea Sketch

September 23, 2024

By Ged Maheux

October is creeping in like a stealthy spider, and with it comes time to embrace our favorite creative tradition – Inktober. This annual event beckons artists, from novice to seasoned pros, to grab their pens, brushes, or Apple Pencils and conjure up something creative each day of the month. It’s the perfect opportunity to unleash your imagination and face the thrilling challenge of turning daily prompts into hauntingly beautiful sketches. Let’s dive into the spooky fun, one eerie doodle at a time!

For the sixth year running, we’re excited to contribute to the Inktober magic by offering a handy set of templates for Linea Sketch, outlining the prompts for all 31 days. This year’s templates are now available for download, with each page clearly labeled by day and prompt, making it easy to stay organized and inspired. Whether you’re aiming for a cohesive set of sketches or just want to keep your daily creations on track, these templates are the perfect tool to keep your creativity sharp and focused throughout the month!

As they are every year, Linea’s Inktober 2024 templates are completely free and easy to set up. Be sure to check out our short video tutorial on how to get the templates into Linea Sketch for the iPad, and you’ll quickly be on your artistic way.

Don’t forget to tag your posts with #LineaSketch on social media! We love sharing our favorite drawings on Linea’s Instagram throughout October, so it’s the perfect chance to shine. Get your screen protectors ready, charge up those Apple Pencils, and prepare to dive into a month of creativity—October will be haunting us before you know it!

Linea Sketch Adds Support for Apple Pencil Pro

August 7, 2024

By Ged Maheux

Today’s update for our handy digital sketching app for the iPad brings Apple Pencil Pro support, including new shortcut squeeze actions and helpful haptic feedback.

Choose from a range of sketching shortcuts like toggling Clear Ink on or off, switching to the previous drawing tool, cycling through tool sizes and even undoing the last drawing action. Squeeze actions work great and we find they are much less likely to be triggered accidentally than the older double-tap Pencil actions. Once you try it, you’ll be hooked! Linea defaults to your system-wide settings for the squeeze action, but you can choose a different action (or ignore squeezes) in Linea’s in-app settings.

Today’s 4.3.3 update also enables haptic feedback, giving you a satisfying but subtle bump when performing certain tasks in Linea, such as creating ZipShapes, snapping to rotation angles, scaling selections and more.

Linea Sketch 4.3.3 also fixes several important bugs, so it benefits all Linea users, even if you don’t own the new Apple Pencil Pro. Visit Linea’s version history page for the complete list of What’s New, and then head on over to the App Store and grab the FREE download of Linea Sketch.

Thinking Outside the Box with MuseBox

July 16, 2024

By David Brasgalla

Sometimes a design project can hit a roadblock and stall out – a point where for some reason it becomes difficult to leap over a certain potential solution in order to arrive at an even better one.

Brushed Pixel came to us for help with this very situation. They had developed a solid starting point for the design of their digital asset management application, Musebox, but enlisted our expertise in taking it further. The concept – a transparent cube containing a small tree – needed to be realized while at the same time ensuring the graphic treatment would work well within the macOS app icon aesthetic.

We decided to take the floral elements of their existing concept art and focus it specifically into a Bonsai cherry tree. These trees are both very beautiful and graphically distinctive at the same time, so it felt like a good choice.

Brushed Pixel wanted a decisive look for the tree trunk itself, so after building the cube container in a macOS style and palette, we started there.

Some quick geometric shapes were suggested how we would populate the branches of the trunk. This graphic could be reduced to get an idea of how the overall design might appear when seen very small. Although the shapes were fun, they weren’t organic enough to be part of a design solution in this case.

Next, a comp was created with further detail, showing more realistic blossoms in place. These were simply one blossom graphic that was transformed and repeated across the design, with a bit of shading added.

The client was pleased but felt the variations in blossom size might work against the realism. We also needed to make sure everything would still read well at small sizes, so a “volume and lighting” comp was roughly painted. This would be our guide in creating the different groupings of blossoms.

We received a green light for this approach, and next adjusted our vectors to replicate it in organic detail.

Creating every unique blossom in vector form was possible but daunting in terms of time and effort. The decision was made to hand-paint these elements, as well as the trunk itself, which would be much faster and would bring even more of an organic feel to the icon. Shading could easily be painted in on a clipping masked overlay in a non-destructive way.

The finished design combines the painted trunk and blossoms with the vector-created transparent box, with lighting and shading effects to suggest that the tree is growing outside of the boundaries of the container.

The public response to the Musebox icon has been fantastic! We’re very happy to have been able to provide what was needed to take the design the final distance to completion in the way that Brushed Pixel originally envisioned. If your team is looking to overcome design challenges with any aspect of your app’s development we’re here to help.

Tot Summer Sale

June 24, 2024

By Cheryl Cicha

Summer’s here! Stay cool by keeping things simple with Tot, our elegant and streamlined text editor for notes, to-dos, and so much more. Tot’s single window design and simple formatting controls mean no more hunting for that chunk of important text.

Tot’s already FREE on macOS, but now the iOS version is on sale at 50% OFF from now until July 8. Grab it in the App Store or find out more at tot.rocks.

Linea Sketch 4.3.2 Brings Quick Background Colors

April 30, 2024

By Ged Maheux

Today’s update to Linea Sketch for the iPad brings a great new feature that makes customizing the appearance of the canvas easier than ever. Simply open the Layers palette, select background options > Custom Background and use the new eyedropper tool to select any color in your drawing.

The canvas changes in real time to reflect your choice. It’s a perfect way to experiment and find just the right background for your sketch. Linea also keeps a running list of recent colors in case you want to revert to an earlier choice at any time.

Linea Sketch 4.3.2 also fixes several important bugs when drawing with Clear Ink, corrects annoying problems with time-lapse recordings and fixes a bug that broke tool options on the iPhone when full Keyboard Access is turned on. Visit Linea’s version history page for the complete list of what’s new, and then head on over to the App Store and grab the FREE download of Linea Sketch.

22 Years Later…

March 12, 2024

By Craig Hockenberry

Header title graphic showing 3 arrow-shaped graphs and the text iPulse

… iPulse is available on another platform!

We released the first version of iPulse on a new operating system called Mac OS X in 2002. Our unobtrusive and stylish system monitor showcased the features of Apple’s new OS and was a hit.

Now, two decades later, we’re happy to announce that groundbreaking product is coming to iOS and iPadOS. And just as it did with macOS, it’s taking a new approach with its user interface to get the job done.

An app that can monitor your device is a great thing to have when you need it, but can get in the way when you don’t. On iOS we solved this problem by using Picture in Picture technology.

iPulse for iOS's window displaying various bar graphs to monitor memory, network speed and more

iPulse for iOS/iPadOS literally creates a movie of what’s going on inside your device and updates it every second. You can resize the display to fit well on your screen, or slide it out of the way completely. We were careful to use minimal system resources, such as CPU (3% usage) and memory (only 1 MB in size), while making the video.

iPulse provides answers to a lot of questions that were previously hard to figure out:

Why does playing this game use so much battery?
Why is this download taking so long?
Is anything syncing?
How much more video can I record on an external drive?
And more…

The movie that’s playing also generates sound effects: there are alert tones when CPU, network, or storage are exceeded. These sounds can be turned off in the app settings.

iPulse also provides an alternate view of your storage: the display you’re used to seeing in Settings > General > Storage does not include cached data used by iCloud and other apps. iPulse shows how much actual space is being used. It also provides a view of external storage – very handy if you’re recording video and quickly filling an external drive.

You can learn more about iPulse on the product website. The app is a one-time purchase that will run on both your iPhone and iPad. It’s a tool no developer or power user should be without: download it today!

Time To Get Started

March 6, 2024

By Ged Maheux

Cartoon illustration of a guy wearing an Iconfactory shirt holding up a sign that reads "Thank you!"

What an amazing ride this past month has been! We appreciate the support of everyone who backed our Project Tapestry Kickstarter as well as those who helped us spread the word far and wide. We couldn’t have reached our goals without your help and we’re so very excited to have an opportunity to bring Project Tapestry to life.

Thanks to you, the project is not only funded, but we even hit our first two stretch goals, which means we’ll be integrating muffling, muting, filtering, search and more, right from the start. We’ve already begun working on design and development during the Kickstarter campaign, so we’re well on our way to making Tapestry a reality. If you backed the campaign keep an eye on your email over the next few weeks and months regarding rewards and various Tapestry related goodness. You won’t want to miss out!

Be sure to follow us here at the Breakroom and on our Mastodon and Threads social media accounts for updates on Tapestry’s progress. Stay tuned – we’re just getting started and there’s a lot more to come.

Project Tapestry’s Home Stretch

February 29, 2024

By Webmaster

Our Kickstarter to bring Project Tapestry to life is in the final stretch. The base project was funded within the first few days, but we’d love to add even more features. To do that we need to hit some stretch goals! We’re asking for your help one last time to spread the word or back the project if you can. We also still have a few pixel portraits available to add on to your pledge – get a hand-drawn custom image made just for you!

If you want to learn even more about Tapestry and get the inside story, be sure to check out these great podcasts:

Double Tap – The importance of accessibility in Project Tapestry and more.

The Aftershow – Where Tapestry came from and our history of making great apps.

Crossed Wires – What goes into developing an app like Tapestry and what’s next.

While the Kickstarter has been up and running, we’ve been busy laying the ground work for development to begin in earnest as soon as the project is funded. We’ve begun wire framing the app’s structure, planning user interactions, coding new plugins, and exploring how Tapestry will sync your data across devices.

Tapestry’s journey is just beginning and with your help, we’re confident we can reach our stretch goals and do our part to support a more open and accessible web. We’re all excited to get to work, so thanks to everyone who has supported the project this month – you’ve helped make Tapestry a reality.

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