Talking about User Interface design — web, mobile, apps and more — we can say for sure that there’s not a key application.

What are the most used apps? First of all, of course, Adobe Photoshop, which was created for pixel manipulation and photo editing, but Adobe is keeping adding features to make it almighty, and today it can achieves a lot of different purposes.

Adobe Illustrator, created to handle vectors, is also used for UI design.

Then we have the little cute Adobe Fireworks — my favorite app —, created by Macromedia. This is the only one application created specifically for UI design from the very beginning, but sadly Adobe doesn’t seem to be interested in pushing it forward.

But today a new application is rising: Sketch, by the great Bohemian Coding.

As for Pixelmator, Sketch is built on OS X tecnhology, so it’s blazing fast and responsive. The UI is really intuitive, like an app designed by Apple — it reminds the iWork suite.

Here are a couple of quotes.

“Dear designer, how often have you thought: someone should build a Photoshop for interface design? Well, it’s here and it’s very good.”
— Koen Bok, Product Designer at Facebook

“Sketch 2 is probably the tool that most user interface and icon designers have been dreaming of for years. A+.”
— Benjamin de Cock, an amazing UI designer

Sketch won the Apple Design Award 2012 and Best of 2012 in the Mac App Store. It’s available on the App Store for just $49 and you can try it for free.

This app is just born, but it’s really fast and intuitive, and more and more world class designers are starting using it. And you?

The Verge published a great article about the redesign of Google after Larry Page became CEO in 2011. Here’s the video interview.

It’s been a year since I started my freelance adventure as user interface designer, and now I’m working on my new portfolio to show off all the UIs I’ve been lucky enough to design in 2012. As usual, I can’t publish any design that’s still in development, so I have to wait — sigh.

For 2013, I hope to keep growing with my freelance activity, and I really look forward to an amazing trip in a cold and polar country. Hopefully I will able to tell something more in the next few months.

Anyway, I punch myself for leaving this blog without new posts for so many months, but this is a new year, and it’s time to start over again.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to publish interesting and inspirational — hopefully — posts more often. As last year, I’ll probably kick off 2013 with a Dribbble invite contest in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

I wish you great adventures for 2013.

Even if it was predictable, the new MacBook Pro equipped with Retina display shocked almost everyone. With a resolution of 2880×1800 at 220 ppi, the new screen looks stunning.

You can see a Full HD video at 100% magnification in Final Cut Pro X, and you still have a lot of room for other panes of the application. If you are a photographer, you can look at your picture four times more than before.

But what about designing something on the new Retina display? It will be interest to see what happens when you create a 960 pixels document — a standard width for websites —  in a graphic application. If one pixel of the artboard corresponds to one pixel of the Retina display, we will have a really small artboard, too small to work on.

To avoid this, it’s probable that the artboard area will be pixel-doubled in order the make its aspect similar to what you would see on a non-Retina display.

But it’s possible that this solution will lead to a common Retina displays “problem”. Since the pixel density and the contrast are very high, every graphic object in the pixel-doubled artwork would appear extremely and ridiculously crisp, since one pixel you draw would correspond to four pixels on the screen.

Does it mean that a Retina display on a Mac is not ideal for a designer? Hard to say. The answer will come once designers will start to work on it and share their reviews.

Leave a comment with your opinions and theories and I’ll willingly discuss about this new hot topic.

Talking about design, functionality and creativity, here is a great sticky memo pad designed by Heochangbong design studio.

The Giving Tree is a sticky memo pad that is shaped as the trunk of a tree. It is playful showing the essence of paper as it is. As the memo pad is used, the trunk of the tree will gradually disappear Sending messages of the effects of wasting paper. So the more it is used, the more trees will disappear. “The Giving Tree” will be donating part of their proceeds to planting trees.

The sticks look great when applied.

There’s also a beautiful little bird, but it’s not on sale yet.

You can buy the Giving Tree here.

As highly anticipated, Apple has just announced the new iPad, and it’s all about the display. It has a 2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch. I think we have to see it in first person in order to understand how gorgeous it is.

Apple hasn’t opted for a quad-core processor, in fact the new chip called A5X is dual-core, but it has quad-core graphics and it’s blazing fast.

The new iPad is not called iPad 3, it’s just the new iPad, and I think it’s a good thing because it’s Apple-ish. In a few years we would have had the iPad 7, not so cool. It’s possible that the next iPhone will follow the same path.

It will be available on March 16 in ten countries: United States, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. If you don’t live in these ten countries, don’t worry, because on March 23 it will be available nearly worldwide.

You can discover every new feature of the new iPad on Apple website.

Today the Cupertino based company sent one of its classic invitations for an event scheduled on March 7th at Yerba Buena, San Francisco.

The display seen in the photo is clearly a Retina Display, and almost everyone on the web is discussing about the absence of the Home button. While the first and spontaneous explanation could be that the iPad in the photo is in landscape mode, Gizmodo posted a really interesting article explaining why the iPad in the photo would be, instead, in portrait mode.

We’re just a week away from the revelation and it’s still feels strange that this will be the first keynote about a key hardware product without Steve Jobs.

It looks like a joke, really. Apple has unveiled the next major release of OS X just seven months after the public launch of Lion. The new version is called Mountain Lion and will be available next summer, just a year after the previous one.

Predictably, Apple is keeping adding iOS features in OS X. You can take a look at the sneak peak page on Apple website, that also shows a video with some new features. Except the new Notification system, the sneak peak does not reveal anything incredible — for now.

The price is still unknown, but after the price of Lion last year, it will probably be around $25.

Does anyone think that Apple is accelerating the launch of the major versions of OS X in order to launch a completely new OS in a few years?

Less is more

While developers and designers keep creating apps that try to reflect real life materials and elements with great textures and effects, Real Mac Software has just launched a minimal to-do app called Clear.

Guess what? It’s great. It really takes advantage of multi-touch and it’s immediate and effective. Take a look at the introduction video.

Clear is now live on the App Store at $0.99.

There are no words to describe such a great music video, so here it is. The song is called Needing/Getting and it’s performed by Ok Go.

Thanks to @TallaMariachi