Laurent Baumann is a French graphic designer whose work has been featured in an incredible amount of applications and websites. He is the designer of such applications as FontCase, Bowtie, Bluebird (which I reviewed earlier this week), Façade, CoverSutra, and many others. You can keep an eye on him by following him on twitter, or visiting his website. Also, if you want to be inspired by incredible drawing skills, check out his Flickr account.

Adam Betts is a 25-year-old, American graphic designer. His work has been featured on numerous blogs, applications, and even in print.  He designed graphics for the first (and maybe second) MacHeist, his emoticon set is being used in AdiumX, he has done UI design for the world’s first, native iPhone App: Lights Off (1 and 2), and audio recording app WireTap Pro. He has also designed icons for CSSEdit, Overflow, and Delicious Library. You can follow him on twitter, and visit his blog.

Sebastiaan De With is a graphic designer based in the Netherlands. He has designed several iPhone apps, including Classics, which was featured on one of Apple’s iPhone commercials.  I personally love all of Sebastiaan’s work, all of which is extremely professional and polished. He authored a video series on Icon Design, you can also see his work on his portfolio site. You can follow him on twitter, and read his blog.

Louie Mantia is a graphic designer based in America. He has created icons for numerous iPhone, and Mac applications. He works for Iconfactory, maker of the popular Twitter client, Twitterific. You can view his work on his portfolio website, and you can also follow him on twitter.

Jonas Rask is a 28-year-old designer/student based in Denmark. He works for Enhanced Labs, who created the icons used in Microsoft Office 2008. He has designed numerous, beautiful icon sets for Microsoft, Chronos,  and many others. You can visit his website, or follow him on twitter.

Bluebird

Public View:
Bluebird’s public view is fairly simple, basically showing all your tweets that are visible to your followers (everything but direct messages). This view allows filtering of your tweets. You can view only your tweets, your replies, your favorite tweets, or your friends’ tweets. If filtering isn’t enough for you, you can also search through your tweets using the search box at the top right of the window. Replying to other tweets is also very easy, you simply click on the tweeter’s avatar, and @username is inserted into the post box. Like most other clients, Bluebird also has a “characters remaining” indicator that is helpful when writing posts. Also Bluebird features a “requests remaining” indicator in the lower left hand corner. The is basically a limit on how many API calls you can make to twitter’s servers. I’m not sure that this is going to be important to most users, but it does provide  some more information to power users.

Bluebird's Public View

Private View:
Direct messages are handled differently in Bluebird than they are in many other clients. There is a separate view only for your direct messages. This view also groups all your direct messages by sender, with an indicator for how many messages you have. Similar to replying, direct messaging somebody is done by clicking on the user’s avatar. I’m not quite sure what additional functionality having a separate view provides, however it is different from most clients out there.

Bluebird's Private View

Skinning System:
One very unique feature of Bluebird, is it’s ability to be skinned using XHTML and CSS. While there are no docs available because it is still in beta, I would imagine that skinning Bluebird is very similar to skinning Bowtie. The only skin that is available now is the default one designed by Laurent Baumann. However I would expect that to change as soon as the public beta becomes available.

What a Bluebird Skin Consists Of

Multiple Account Support:
Bluebird supports multiple twitter accounts at the same time. This is nice for developers and others who create twitter accounts for products they are launching. Switching views is done with a dropdown in the title bar.

Bluebird's Multiple Account Support

Overall Impression:
Bluebird has an incredible amount of potential. Right now it is in pre-beta, and I would not use it on a daily basis. However I have faith that by the time public release rolls around it will be ready to rock my twitter account. The skinning feature is extremely important to this application’s success. I’m sure the MacThemes.net community  will have plenty of themes out for us to use within a few days of Bluebird being released. While the version of Bluebird I have now is not ready to replace Twitterific, I am sure that by its public release (It is at 0.70, once it reaches 1.0 it will be publicly released) it will be more than ready to replace any other twitter client. Bluebird is a very well thought out application, and I would defenitely recommend keeping an eye on Matt and Laurent’s twitter feed, and its website. Kudos to {13bold} for yet another wonderful piece of software!

Screenshot of Safari 4

Interface Changes

1. Tabs: Safari 4 sports a new implementation of tabs. Tabs are now at the top of the window, which in my opinion looks far too similar to Google Chrome’s implementation of tabs.
   

   Chrome's Tabs Vs Safari 4's Tabs

2. Visual History: Viewing your history is now graphical. Using Cover Flow, you can easily view your history visually. It is a pretty nice feature, and Cover Flow is being used in more and more of apple’s products.
   

   Viewing The History In Safari 4

3. Top Sites: When you opened a tab in safari 3, it would just bring up a blank page. Now in Safari 4 there is a “wall” of your top visited sites.
   

   Top Visited Sites

Rendering Engine Changes

1. Acid 3: The new version of WebKit that is included allows Safari to pass the acid test with flying colors. Safari 3 only achieved a 39/100.
2. Nitro Javascript Engine: The new javascript rendering engine makes Safari’s rendering 4 time faster than Firefox 3

There are over 150 new features in Safari 4, so I couldn’t cover them all in one blog post, so I tried to highlight the most interesting features. To view all the changes you can check out Apple’s Safari Features Page

Bugs/Problems

1. Apple Mail: After installing Safari 4 Mail.app crashes about every 30 seconds. It is due to the new version of WebKit that is installed with Safari 4. This is caused by the GrowlMail plugin, if you disable it it fixes the problem.
2. 1Password: 1Password does not officially support  this release of Safari 4, but it does support the Developer preview, to get it to work in Safari 4, go to 1password.app>Contents>Resources>SupportedBrowsers.plist and change 5528.1 to 5529 (Thanks Martin!)

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Final Result Of Curved Shadow Tutorial

Grab The Source File For This Tutorial

Step 1: Open File & Add Padding

Open the file in photoshop, and give the image spacing of about 20px on all sides. It should look like this:

Image With A Border of About 20px

Step 2: Setup Guides

Next, set guides around all 4 sides of the image (not the document). Add another guide 10px from the left, and another 10px from the right. Finally, add the last guide 15px from the bottom, so it looks like this:

Image With All Guides Set

Step 3: Add 1st Stroke

After adding the guides, give the image a white, outer stroke with a width of 3px, the layer style dialog should look like this:

Layer Style Settings For Your First Stroke

Your image should look like this:

How The Image Stroke Should Look

Step 4: Convert To Smart Object

Next, convert your image to a smart object (right click on the layer>convert to smart object). If you have a version of Photoshop below CS3, just rasterize the layer (right click on the layer>rasterize).

Step 5: Add 2nd Stroke

After converting your image to a smart object, add a second stroke to your layer. Give it a 1px, inner stroke, that is a light gray (I used #dcd3d3). The layer style dialog should look like this:

Layer Style For 2nd Stroke

Your image should look like this:

Your Image With a Second Stroke

Step 6: Create 2 Lines

After that, drag 2 lines with a weight of 10px from the inner guide on the left, to the inner guide on the right, and again from the inner guide on the right to the inner guide on the left. After, it should look like this:

Image With Lines Drawn

Step 7: Rearrange Layers

After creating the lines, simply drag your image layer so that it is above the lines. It should look like this:

Image With Lines Under It

Step 7: Blur Lines

After rearranging your layers, select one of the lines, and give it a gaussian blur (filter menu>blur>gaussian blur). I used a blur radius of 6px, but use your judgement, and play around with it a bit. After you do this, you may need to move the lines up or down a few pixels to get the positioning just right.

You Are Finished! The final should look something like this:

The Final Product!

That’s it for this tutorial, if you have any questions, please just comment and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Secondly this blog will also serve as my professional portfolio. As you may, or may not know, I am a freelance Web Developer. In the coming weeks and months I will be developing a new section of the site to showcase my previous work, and my current projects. I am very passionate about the work I do, and I’m always looking to learn more about anything I can related to the field. As such, I am always starting up new projects and coming up with ideas.

While most of the topics will pertain to Web Development and Graphic Design, I will occasionally touch on topics related to technology in general, and often times amazing applications for Mac OS X. I will admit it, I am quite biased. I love my mac, and nothing will ever change that.

Lastly, I would like to thank you, the visitor for coming to my blog! Nothing makes me happier than to see my Google Analytics (or mint stats) climbing.  Also please feel free to comment, ask questions, suggest changes, hell even point out if I’m wrong (I’ve been told it may happen at some time in my life :P)

Thank you for visiting, and  I hope to see you again soon!

Sincerely,
Brendan DeBeasi