Brad here. The Designer Sheep. I’m going to be speaking at 360|iDev San Jose along with Dave Wiskus in April. Our talk is entitled “Core Elegance” and we’ll be talking about how to think, look, and do like a mobile app designer should.  We’ve got a kick ass presentation lined up, should be a good time.

In commemoration of the event, I’ve created a wallpaper.  Its a Möbius Strip, a shape with one side.  Simple in concept, beautiful in presentation. Check it out here.

Also, you can use promo code “CountingSheep” during registration to save 20%.

Today is the official Fourth Birthday of RogueSheep, Incorporated.

Four years ago on February 17th, 2004 a group of restless engineers that had all left their cozy positions as engineers and engineering managers at Adobe Systems took the next step in making their little startup business a reality by filing the articles of incorporation that officially birthed RogueSheep.

Its been a fairly remarkable 5+ years years since the first gatherings that would lead to the formation of our beloved little business. From basement meetings and home offices, to the christening of our official headquarters in Seattle. From the launch of our first product, to the suspension of its further development. We’ve lived through the departure of old sheep and the arrival of new sheep. Product ideas have come and gone; projects have been canceled only to be revived and later suspended. We’ve done work for clients as small as a group publishing the writings of Tibetan monks, to as large as world-renowned software vendors and retail chains. Altogether we’ve seen and done quite a few remarkable feats and learned a phenomenal amount about running a business along the way. Throughout it all we have continued to use our experiences, the successes as well as the occasional missteps, to hone our business model and refocus our efforts.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with how it has all turned out. The decision to leave the comfortable confines of the large corporation and to strike out as an independent developer ranks as one of the best decisions I have ever made. Sure there have been those scary moments; wondering if its really all going to work and can we really support our families doing this? Its definitely a ton of hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that running your own business isn’t a 60+ hour a week job at the minimum. If all you have ever known is the sheltering womb of the mother corporation, it can be quite a shock to find out how many little details someone else has always taken care of for you.

Still, I can’t imagine anything more exciting or enticing than my current job. I learn something new every week and its certainly never boring around here. Much like the joy of producing a new piece of software from nothing but bits in the ether, growing a business from the embryonic, huddled meetings in a basement to a stable fixture with a solid reputation and excellent prospects for the future is nothing short of intoxicating.

As RogueSheep enters its fifth year, things are continuing to look great. We have plans for a notable expansion of staff this year and are on track to deliver some innovative new technology to the market. We continue to work with existing clients on exciting new projects while looking to navigate new partnerships and alliances while moving forward. I predict a thrilling and banner year as our toddler comes into its own.

Happy Birthday RogueSheep and thanks to my tireless partners and associates for making this such an excellent company to work with and for.

Flying Meat’s latest bit of software goodness, Acorn, has been receiving excellent press and reviews around the web since its release some months back. Recently Scott Stevenson, frequent provider of fine analysis of the Macintosh and Cocoa programming at the Theocacao blog, did a small review of Acorn.

Scott overviews many of the interesting approaches Gus has taken with Acorn’s user interface and gives much praise to the application’s take on simplicity and convention. He goes on to discuss the image filtering UI in Acorn which prominently features design and coding by the flock here at RogueSheep. You’ll find a similar filtering experience in our Magma Effects InDesign and Illustrator plug-ins.

We are glad to see more and more folks fall in love with Acorn and are proud to have been able to help provide a portion of the features and user experience for those users.

Not only is RogueSheep buddy, Mike Lee, an accomplished fashion expert, he is now a bona fide author.

My congratulations go out to Mike for his first published work, Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond the Manual. I know how hard it can be to juggle several serious commitments at once. Between developing Delicious Library 2.0, spending time at the tailor getting fitted and playing chicken with Buicks in the street its hard to imagine he also found time to co-author a fine technical tome. I guess its all in a day’s work for the world’s toughest Mac programmer.

Maybe this is aready common knowledge, but I just stumbled upon a little time saver in the iPhone mail application. Normally when I want to delete an email, I click the message from the mailbox list and then use the trash can button to dispose of it while viewing the content.

Turns out that its possible to delete directly from the list without having to view the message content. Simply swipe your finger across the message entry in the list. Once you do this a delete button slides in that you can press to trash that spam with extreme prejudice.

No doubt, its hard to imagine what I might say here about the iPhone that you haven’t already seen on any of the dozens of news sites or hundreds of personal blogs out here in the ether. Let me just start by throwing out the obligatory: its not perfect, but man is it a joy to own and use so far.

Every non-techie I have shown it to this weekend has been floored by what it can do and the ease of navigation in the interface. It has been interesting to watch my wife with the iPhone and her brand new Razr. She sails around the iPhone with ease, while regularly cursing the Razr.

In an effort to be relevant I’ll list a few details I’ve noticed and features I’m missing that may not have received as much press elsewhere:

• If you hold your finger over a button or link on a web page it pops up a tip with the action or link listed.
• Bluetooth is weak. No sending contacts or syncing. Its pretty much for pairing with a headset and not much else at this point.
• There is limited RSS support in a web-based reader at mac.com. Clicking on a feed in Safari takes you to the web application.
• After 3 other phones and 2 previous carriers, I finally get reception at my house.
• There is no threading of messages in Mail. No searching either. 
• At first I thought there was no audio scrubbing while in iPod mode. Turns out if you tap on the album art in the “Now Playing” screen, up pops a draggable thumb control. You can also adjust shuffle and repeat here.

I feel that this device has such an intuitive and pleasurable interface that it really sets one’s expectations high. It feels so much like using a “real” OS, I find myself expecting all the luxuries I’m used to when tethered to my laptop or desk. Once I remind myself this is all on a phone, it all comes back in perspective and I think of how I wouldn’t even have bothered to explore things like email, the web or photos on a phone until a device like this came along.

In the next post I’ll go into some detail about how completely non-revolutionary or pleasurable the ride has been so far with the “new” AT&T.

Get your compiler warmed-up and editor prep’d. Iron Coder V starts in less than 24 hours. I’m just praying the API is Quartz Composer and the theme is Conspiracy Theories.

Check out the cornucopia of cool prizes this time around! I suspect the admission to C4[1] has several rabid mac-devs frothing at the mouth already.

The Flash is disabled? Someone call the Justice League quick!