Das Weblog von Stefan Grund, der im Netz als @eay unterwegs ist und hier seit 2003 über Medien, Popkultur und Technologie schreibt. Mehr » 

#design

Last year when I switched to Pocket Casts for all my (cross-platform) podcast needs, I released a purple version of the official app icon, because, well, thanks to Apple Podcasts my brain is hardwired to think of podcasts as purple.

The image displays three app icons: two for “Pocket Casts” in purple and black themes, and one for “Podcasts” with a purple circular design.

When iOS 18 came out on Monday with support for alternative dark app icons, I quickly realized that my purple Pocket Casts icon wasn’t really working there. So I went back to the Apple Podcasts app, which now only shows a purple icon on a dark gradient for dark mode. And so I updated my icon with the same style – here’s my purple Pocket Casts icon for dark mode.

The image shows two app icons for “Reeder”, both featuring a star on a dark, striped background, but with slightly different shades.

And while I was creating the icon, I noticed that the alternative „Reeder 4“ icon, that I have always used as the icon for Reeder 5 (now „Reeder Classic“), didn’t quite match the dark mode either. So I just changed it, here is the slightly darker Reeder 4 icon.

“We propose the symbol ⁂ to represent the fediverse”

⁂ is a typographical character, not an icon that needs to be inserted as an image. Unique-looking, but standardised. This means it’s very easy to copy-paste around! […]

⁂ is called an asterism. In astronomy, it refers to groups of stars in the sky, akin to constellations. We suggest that it’s a very fitting symbol for the fediverse, a galaxy of interconnected spaces which is decentralised and has an astronomically-themed name. It represents several stars coming together, connecting but each their own, without a centre.

Nice idea. I just followed @liaizon’s example and set the iOS/macOS text replacement feature to expand *** into ⁂.

Pentagram hat eine neue Brand Identity für Reddit entworfen.

Ich bin vor allem gespannt, wie die neuen, visuellen Subreddit-Chatbubbles eingesetzt werden – und ob sie den offiziellen Client – nachdem sie Apollo & Co. gekillt haben – im Zuge dessen endlich aufhübschen.1

  1. Eigentlich auch spannend, welche Parallelen es zu Twitter/X gibt: Man kauft den besten Third-Party Client (bei Twitter war es Tweetie, hier Alien Blue), verhunzt diesen und killt dann den API-Zugang für andere, bessere Clients… [↩]

Three podcast app icons

A few months ago I switched to Pocket Casts for all my (cross-platform) podcast needs. I couldn’t be happier with the app, but there’s one thing: Podcasts have to be purple1 and so does my podcast client’s app icon. And while there’s a great variety of app icon designs within Pocket Casts already2, there’s no Apple-Podcasts-like, purple one.

Until now! Here’s my purple app icon for Pocket Casts.

Update, 18.09.2024: I’ve just released a dark purple version for iOS 18’s dark mode.

  1. Thank you, Apple. [↩]
  2. For example, I really like the colorful one for the current Pride month. [↩]