If you're one of the millions of Sims fans around the world this next piece of news might interest you. EA is bringing their hit freemium version of the game, The Sims Freeplay to Android. No exact date as yet, but it will be launching in the Android Market sometime in February. 

In Freeplay, you can control the daily shenanigans of upto 16 different Sims, designing and directing their lives as you see fit. In a break from the norm, Freeplay runs in 24-hour cycles meaning that you will need to check in throughout the day and respond to your Sims needs in real time. The game will also employ an in-app purchase model, but everything can be unlocked free of charge if you're willing to put the time in. 

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Rhapsody streams your favorite music to your Android phone, Google TV, and even your Sonos player. Today, the company added Android tablets to the list thanks to a new tablet view designed specifically with 7 to 10-inch screens in mind.

“We didn’t just resize Rhapsody – we re-imagined the entire experience for the tablet,” said Rhapsody CPO Brendan Benzing.

The new Rhapsody tablet mode is a prime example of the cool things developers can do with a tablet. As expected, users can stream songs and build playlists or queues, but the larger screen allows them to do it without constantly pressing the back button. It’s also much easier to browse through a library because Rhapsody greets users with a screen showcasing featured content in three sections: New Releases; Popular artists, albums, and songs; and Suggestions for artists to listen to based on the music users have already added to their library.

Rhapsody also has an action bar for the Browse, Features, My Music, Radio (stations built around an artist or genre), search, and control sections. A right panel shows the album cover art, playlist, and controls to play or skip back/forward. A homescreen widget is also included, but it could stand to larger than the 4×1 included considering there’s so much more room to utilize.

The design choices are all good, but I especially like the Featured content that Rhapsody delivers for music discovery. The homescreen has a sliding carousel for featured artists and articles built around a subject, but there’s an entire section dedicated to similar lists. Writers have hand-picked recommendations based on the popular songs in your senior year of high-school, themed mixtapes, and “Cheat Sheets” for buzzworthy artists or bands who sound like one of your favorite artists. There are occasional misses like the love-her-or-really-really-really-hate her Lana Del Ray, but the content is otherwise interesting to browse.

Rhapsody is available for download now. The app requires a $9.99 monthly subscription fee to stream music. You can also store music for offline use and cache streaming to improve playback quality. Some devices might want to disable the cache feature because it might prevent playback at all (I had to turn it off for my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to work).

KEY FEATURES

- Artist biographies and album reviews from some of the top music writers in the industry

- Unlimited access to over 14 million songs

- Customized playlists, new music recommendations

- Exclusive content: artist interviews, live performances and pre-release listening

 

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Yahoo – you know, that other search engine — have added a search category for Android applications. The main search results page sees a new tab labelled "Apps" giving users the opportunity to find Android applications attached to any of their search queries. We're not short of ways to search for apps across the interwebs, but seeing such a well run solution from major, mainstream a search engine is definitely a good thing.

The service also covers iOS applications, but has a handy filter to ensure that we don't see those when we're searching. Search results can also be filtered for price and category. When you find an app you like, right from the search results you can head straight to the Android Market to download, send a link for the app to your phone or scan a QR code for the application. You can also quite handily view the Android Market reviews for each application you find without having to go to the Market first which is a nice touch. We also get a "trending now" box, and it too has the iPhone/Android filter choices applied. 

I tried it out by typing in "soccer football scores" and the results were pleasantly surprising. Yahoo's own apps featured pretty prominently towards the top of the results, but it brought up results for ESPN Scorecenter, ScoreMobile, and Sky Sports Football Score Centre to name but a few. 

All in all it's a pretty well designed feature, and while Yahoo may not be the most popular search engine, it does a good job of what it set out to do. Perhaps a bigger point to mention is that it offers a more comprehensive application search solution that Google themselves. Choice is always a good thing, so try it out for yourselves by hitting the source link below. 

Source: Yahoo

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Yahoo – you know, that other search engine — have added a search category for Android applications. The main search results page sees a new tab labelled "Apps" giving users the opportunity to find Android applications attached to any of their search queries. We're not short of ways to search for apps across the interwebs, but seeing such a well run solution from major, mainstream a search engine is definitely a good thing.

The service also covers iOS applications, but has a handy filter to ensure that we don't see those when we're searching. Search results can also be filtered for price and category. When you find an app you like, right from the search results you can head straight to the Android Market to download, send a link for the app to your phone or scan a QR code for the application. You can also quite handily view the Android Market reviews for each application you find without having to go to the Market first which is a nice touch. We also get a "trending now" box, and it too has the iPhone/Android filter choices applied. 

I tried it out by typing in "soccer football scores" and the results were pleasantly surprising. Yahoo's own apps featured pretty prominently towards the top of the results, but it brought up results for ESPN Scorecenter, ScoreMobile, and Sky Sports Football Score Centre to name but a few. 

All in all it's a pretty well designed feature, and while Yahoo may not be the most popular search engine, it does a good job of what it set out to do. Perhaps a bigger point to mention is that it offers a more comprehensive application search solution that Google themselves. Choice is always a good thing, so try it out for yourselves by hitting the source link below. 

Source: Yahoo

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To our readers who happen to be Android developers, I hope you know that RIM wants to give you a free BlackBerry Playbook. VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders has said that Android developers who repackage their apps and submit it to BB AppWorld will get a free Playbook. Sounds like a great deal, but with several hundred thousand apps in the Android Market, a huge number of developers might take RIM up on that offer.

Clearly RIM has to do something to attract attention away from Android and iOS, but especially Android. Much of Android’s growth over the past two years has come at the expense of RIM’s BlackBerry OS. The former leading smartphone operating system has fallen consistently while Android has risen to take the top spot and iOS has held relatively steady. RIM and its recently appointed new CEO need to do something to reverse BlackBerry’s fortunes.

Take a look at the comScore data that was released yesterday. In the three-month average ending December 2011, Android grew to a 47.3 percent share of smartphone subscribers. That’s up from the 44.8 percent in September. Comparatively, Apple went up from 27.4 to 29.6 percent, and RIM went down from 18.9 to 16.0 percent. The smartphone war continues to be a battle between Google and Apple, with RIM and Microsoft left to fend for scraps. Microsoft has made its aggressive push with Nokia, and RIM has yet to find a plan to attract customers.

So now we return to the tablets-for-apps trade-off. RIM probably believes that attracting a higher number of Android developers will increase the quality of its BlackBerry AppWorld. These developers helped improve Android’s overall quality, so maybe they can work some of that magic for BlackBerry, too? Even if this doesn’t attract new users, at least having better apps might stop the bleeding and encourage current fans to stick around longer until a new crop of devices emerge at the end of the year. It’s probably a cheap solution when you consider that there’s a probably huge inventory of unsold Playbooks sitting in a warehouse in Waterloo.

Android still holds the dominant position in comScore’s MobiLens report, a survey of 30,000 smartphone subscribers in the United States. That was thanks in part to the combined popularity of Samsung, LG, and Motorola, who ranked as the top three phone producers (when including non-smartphones as well).

 

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Natural talent only takes you so far. This is what carries you the rest of the way.

Some business people are like rock stars: Richard, Warren, Bill, the late Steve—all rock stars.

Why are they like rock stars? Even without the last names, you immediately recognize them.

And just like rock stars, many people dream of being like them.

It’s certainly possible to become a rock star and achieve excellence in just about any field we choose, but excellence comes with a price. Natural talent only takes us so far. Excellence requires incredible focus, massive effort, and an almost superhuman drive and work ethic.

I’m lucky to know a few incredibly talented and successful people. One is a speaker. I once attended five consecutive engagements with him. Even though the basic makeup of each audience was the same, I was surprised by how different his speech was each time. I asked why.

“I’ve worked and reworked that speech a number of times,” he said. “I can give that speech on auto-pilot. In a good way, because I don’t have to think about what I’m saying. That frees me up to me read the audience, cover any mistakes I make, adapt to venue or equipment problems, digress when it feels right, and pull the plug on a segment that’s not working. All that prep work lets me focus on the audience instead of on myself.”

"How many times," I asked, "is a “number” of times?"

“I have a 20 Rule,” he said. “I run through a new speech 20 times in my office. Then I do it 20 times in an empty auditorium. Then I do 20 more, one person at a time, begging friends, colleagues, family, and anyone I can get to listen and critique me. Then I pick 20 small organizations and deliver it for free so I can work out the kinks with a live audience. After that I think I’m ready, but it still takes 20 or so real gigs before I feel I’m really on point.”

Since his average keynote runs about 70 minutes, that means he typically spends almost a hundred hours rehearsing a speech—after he spent several weeks writing it.

I told that story to a friend who wants to be a speaker. He said, "There’s no way I would put that kind of time into a speech." Then he paused. “Well, I guess I would if I was as successful as he is.”

And that, of course, is the problem. Successful people don’t work hard because they are successful. Successful people are successful because they work hard.

Most of us fall into the same trap. We think, "Sure, if I was in (my dream spot) I would work really hard too.” But we only reach our dream spot by first working incredibly hard and doing what few other people are willing to do.

How driven and focused would you be if, say, you owned a $10 million company? How hard would you work if you were, say, Branson or Buffett or Gates?

Would you work harder than you currently are because the effort would then seem worthwhile?

The key is to turn the equation around: Don’t wait until you somehow fall into your dream spot to start working hard. Start working hard now. While there's no guarantee that incredible effort will make you a business rock star, it's certain that if you don't put in the effort first, you never will be.

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We knew that the Boxee desktop app’s days were numbered, we just didn’t realize how numbered. It was only the day after Christmas that we learned version 1.5 would be the last to ship for Linux, Windows and OS X. Now, with January coming to a close, its life is officially being snuffed out. Tonight, as you flip the calendar to February, Boxee will be busy purging its servers of the installable media center software. What that means, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is that this is your last chance to download the official app for your desktop OS of choice as the company shifts focus to the Boxee Box and other streaming appliances. Of course, we’re sure someone will pick up the torch and update the program, but as far as Boxee is concerned it has no desktop son.

Boxee desktop app being removed from servers tonight, get it while you can originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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File-sharing site The Pirate Bay caused an Internet stir last week when it introduced a new content category called “Physibles,” essentially designed to allow people to pass one another physical objects for download. The term refers to data files that are actually able to become physical objects via 3D printing technology.

Before long, The Pirate Bay said in a blog post, “you will print the spare parts for your vehicles.”

Some saw the announcement as an overhyped publicity stunt. Others saw a powerful revolution of how humans acquire essential goods. But one expert Mashable spoke with this week said that 3D printing is indeed bound for the mainstream — and even sooner than The Pirate Bay might think.

“If you want to draw that parallel, we are kind of in the early 1980s of the computer industry right now, when it was just moving from mainframes into home computers,” said Hod Lipson, a Cornell University associate professor of both Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science.

“I see a big future for 3D printers in personal-scale applications that will unfold over the next decade.”

That big future will probably include kids like Riley Lewis and Vernon Bussler (right and left, respectively, in the accompanying photo).

Riley and Vernon are eighth graders. Along with a small cohort of classmates at Discovery Charter School in the Bay Area, they’re already getting pretty deep into the world of 3D design and printing. After Riley developed a strong interest and aptitude for 3D printing a couple of years ago, a company called 3D Systems donated a 3D printer worth several hundred dollars for him to use at school.

The class of some dozen students is one a very small number of middle school labs beginning to delve into the emerging industry. The group’s work has been featured in a Popular Science blog post, and they have already produced items including dice, jewelry and replacement parts for the printer. Their progress reflects a tangible future for the medium that exists outside of exclusive laboratories and research facilities.

“It’s just amazing to have an idea and then be able to create a perfect rendition of it, something you can physically hold and touch,” Riley told Mashable.

Vernon said that their classmates react with “a combination of ‘that’s cool’ and ‘I don’t get it.’”

According to Lipson, more and more people will begin to “get it” in the coming years.

“When you unleash this capability to make physical objects in any shape or form, the implications are tremendous in nearly every aspect of our lives,” he said.

In its blog post announcing “Physibles,” The Pirate Bay claimed that “You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”

But that will actually happen “a lot sooner,” said Lipson, who co-authored a report on printing physical objects for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Lipson said he foresees 3D printers existing in a variety of different scales and applications. Machines at home might produce food and toys. (A team led by Lipson unveiled a food printer last year.) Neighborhood centers analogous to Kinko’s or Home Depot might provide more high-end services. And specialty shops might print their own replacement parts, for example an auto body shop printing spare car parts.

Meanwhile, kids like Riley and Vernon will continue to passionately tinker away, not dissimilar to how home enthusiasts helped high-powered institutions develop the computer decades earlier. Riley said he is especially enthusiastic about pursuing the printing of physical objects into college and beyond.

But what does Riley most want to print right now? “Another 3D printer,” he said.

What do you think the future holds for 3D printing? What do you most want to print at home? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Dave Lewis

More About: 3d printing, the pirate bay

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Are you still clinging on to your legacy Windows 95/98/XP install? Maybe your netbook is running one of Microsoft’s old OSes? Screw Windows Phone 7 and its colorful flat tiles, because now you can install the full desktop copy of Microsoft’s operating systems on your Android smartphone.

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Nyan Cat is one of those memes that the more you try to avoid it, the more likely you are to encounter it. The solution is, of course, to embrace the meme and embrace the cat. That way you’ll get it out of your system and when Nyan Cat next crops up as you trawl your way around the InterWebs you won’t give two Nyan Cats about it.

Non-Stop Nyan Cat! is surely the best way of embracing the damn thing. And you can make use of this particular website by testing your own tolerance levels and the tolerance levels of those around you. I swear that anyone who can spend longer than 10 minutes on the Non-Stop Nyan Cat! site deserves some kind of medal. A Nyan Cat-shaped one, obviously.

What The Hell Is Nyan Cat?

Nyan Cat is made up of three different components: an animated GIF drawn to show what a creature combining a cat and a Pop-Tart would look like, a remix of a Japanese pop song with the Japanese word for “Meow” repeated over and over on a loop, and a YouTube video bringing the previous two components together in one glorious whole.

Non-Stop Nyan Cat!, meanwhile, is a website featuring our titular hero. He dons many disguises, his catchy tune changes wildly, but it’s still Nyan Cat and he’s still as annoying as anything you could ever possibly imagine. In triplicate.

Pick A Flavor, Any Flavor

Non-Stop Nyan Cat! features an astonishing array of Nyan Cat’s brethren. Click on ‘Pick A Flavor‘ and a sidebar appears with a smörgåsbord of 23 choices (at the time of writing) for you to pick from. You surely have to try them all, don’t you? I did, and it hasn’t done me any harm. Everyone does have a rainbow trailing behind them as they fly, don’t they?

Three of my favorite twists on the original Nyan Cat are:-

Ganja Nyan

To become Ganja Nyan, Nyan dons a Jamaican beanie, and steel drums are thrashing out the original tune. Stereotyping at its best.

Jackson 5 Nyan

To become Jackson 5 Nyan, Nyan dons a huge 1970?s-style afro and the original tune is cleverly entwined with I Want You Back by the Jackson 5.

Retro Nyan

To become Retro Nyan, Nyan enters a sepia world as if he has been given a part in a Charlie Chaplin-esque silent movie. The piano cover of the Nyan tune is very fitting.

Test Your Tolerance

How much of Non-Stop Nyan Cat! can you stand?

I managed 600 seconds (or 10 minutes). At which point I was ready to either put my fist through the screen or kick my own cat purely because he vaguely resembles Nyan Cat. In the end I merely took a screenshot as proof of my powers of tolerance and quickly shut the page. Then I lay in the bath sobbing for a while in order to recover from the emotional turmoil I had just put myself through.

See if you can do better. Just don’t cheat by muting the volume. Suffer! Like I did. Not that I’m bitter, you understand.

Annoy… Everyone

Once you’ve got sick of testing your own tolerance levels for listening and watching an animated flying cat with a rainbow shooting out of its backside, it’s time to annoy everyone else with it.

Whether you’re at work, school, in a public library, or even at home, I’d say it’s entirely appropriate to hijack a friend or colleague’s computer and make him sit through Non-Stop Nyan Cat. Just open the website, pick your favorite flavor of Nyan Cat and walk away quickly. And quietly. Trying not to hum the Nyan Cat tune as you do so.

Sometimes it isn’t even necessary to actually hijack someone else’s computer to annoy them with Non-Stop Nyan Cat! While playing with the site in order to write this article I’ve made sure to have my volume up high. You know, to really get into the spirit of the thing. My housemate is almost ready to throttle me, and I’m pretty sure one of my neighbors (thin walls) had a nightmare involving Nyan Cat thanks to my spectacular efforts.

Extending The Life Of The Meme

You may have thought, like I did, that Nyan Cat was set to be an Internet meme that lived and died in 2011. But no. Thanks to Non-Stop Nyan Cat! and the efforts of many on YouTube, Nyan Cat looks set to live on for a while yet.

You can also have Nyan Cat invade a webpage, or add Nyan Cat to a progress bar. God help us all.

YouTube has many variations on a theme starring Nyan Cat. My favorite of which has to be the 10-hour, 24-hour, and 50-hour videos which feature nothing other than Nyan Cat flying through the night sky. The 10-hour one, as embedded above, is even presented in HD. I’m sure YouTube really appreciated processing that particular waste of time.

Non-Stop Nyan Cat! even features a store selling various Nyan Cat products. These include games, wrapping paper, mugs, and clothes. My favorite of which has to be the ‘Yes We Nyan!’ t-shirt and hoodie featuring Nyan Cat as Barack Obama. I’m easily pleased.

Conclusion

Have you had enough of Nyan Cat yet? Please say you’ve had enough by now. Because I can’t take any more. I’m out. Nyan Cat is dead to me. Non-Stop Nyan Cat! has finally managed to kick my habit of listening and watching this foul creation galloping endlessly to nowhere. Now I need to find a darkened room suitable for me to curl up in the fetal position.

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For months we’ve been waiting on Razer’s Blade notebook, a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren’t sure whether to laud or mock. It’s just that it’s kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. But after our hands-on at CES, we were convinced that it was at the very least impressive and well-built, and apparently enough other people thought so that Razer sold out almost immediately.

Now, the actual number sold isn’t mentioned, but Razer isn’t a small company and they were going all-out with this thing at CES. But we’ve seen devices launch to sales of dozens, so a strong response to a launch like this is definitely good news.

The company shared the news on their Facebook page, and urges prospective buyers to sign up for a notification email list. Hopefully that $2800 won’t burn a hole in your pocket in the meantime.

Personally, I’m more excited about their plans to disconnect the touchscreen and LCD keys from the laptop, making a customizable piece of hardware you can use with your existing PC. I’m not really down with the small-screen gaming and I like my keyboards a little meatier, so the Blade isn’t for me — but I do have gear envy when I see all those future toys on the side.

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Pinspire vs. Pinterest

It doesn’t get more blatant than this. Pinspire is pretty much a pixel-for-pixel Pinterest clone, created by the serial digital ripoff artists at Rocket Internet. It’s a bit obscene just how much of a copycat Pinspire is — from concept to functionality to the cursive-style logo. Will it be as lucrative for the Rocket’s Sawmer Brothers as their other projects, an eBay clone they sold to the real auction site for $50 million or the European deals site that Groupon gobbled up? Or will someone finally serve them with a cease-and-desist letter? If that happens, someone please pin it.

Click here to view this gallery.

In the world of social media, discovering that worthwhile original idea for your app or website is by far the hardest thing to get right. It’s so hard, in fact — and the field so potentially lucrative — that many parties who jump into the field tend not to bother. Why should you create something original when there are so many successful sites and services that you can just rip off?

At least that appears to be the thinking behind many Internet companies whose concepts, web design or apps appear to owe a lot to other, more successful forebears. Once you start looking, it’s not hard to find digital ripoffs. At best, they’re quirky homages inspired by a successful digital brand. At worst, they’re ersatz imitators looking to cash in on someone else’s idea — just a step or two above malware.

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. After all, the humor writer Josh Billings once said, “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” If you substitute “web designer” for “writer,” he may have been talking about the state of digital design today. After all, it would be impossible to find a design that isn’t at least a little derivative.

SEE ALSO: Top 5 Web Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Still, there’s a difference between borrowing some core design ideas and wholesale imitating. In social media, where the essential premise of connecting and sharing with your friends provides a basic architecture, perhaps the line between the two is blurrier than in other fields. After all, Facebook was called a MySpace clone, which was called a Friendster clone before that. But they are (and were) nothing like each other.

While building on existing concepts will always be part of design, so too will mimics, where the cloning is so pervasive and total that the site is nothing more than a copy of the original, merely slipped into a different skin. Here are the 10 most flagrant design ripoffs in social media today, at least to Mashable‘s eye.

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Domo, the SaaS business intelligence startup launched by Omniture founder Josh James, has raised $20 million in new funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). This round brings total investment in Domo to $63 million. Previous investors include Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angel, and Hummer Winblad.

As you may remember, Omniture is a web analytics SaaS company that went public and was subsequently bought by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. Last year, James debuted his next project, Domo, with $33 million in funding from Benchmark, and aimed to tackle the business intelligence space. Domo purchased a company called Corda, and started accepting customers on a selective basis to test out the platform.

James tells us in an interview that he believes existing business intelligence offerings are static and non-collaborative. He is seeking to put all of this in the cloud, but in a scalable and easy to use format so people can actually make sense of (and make money off of) massive amounts of business data. James is hesitant to reveal exact details on how the application works but says the SaaS is a “dramatic departure for existing business intelligence offerings.” The application is able to analyze business data and display it in a user-friendly and realtime format.

“We’re continuing to build out our company to attack and completely reform an old industry that doesn’t work, while creating a brand new way of doing business with our business management platform,” said James.

He also tells us that the company still has much of the $43 million in funding raised last year in the bank but decided to raise additional funding because the company wanted to be aggressive with acquisitions in the coming year. IVP apparently was outbid by Benchmark in the last round, and jumped at the opportunity to to work with James and fund Domo.

IVP actually backed Omniture back in the day, and as Todd Chaffee, General Partner at IVP explained to me, “our investment thesis can be summarized in two words-Josh James.” Chaffee says that James is in the category of the Marc Benioffs, Larry Ellisons and Michael Dells of the enterprise world. “When he showed us what he was doing, we were in. We were blown away by what he built. He’s crazy enough and passionate enough to have a bigger exit than Omniture.”

“Josh and the Domo team are at the forefront of a huge opportunity,” said said Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who is also a Domo Board Member. “Domo has the team, the vision, the focus and the product to transform an entire market.”

James says that for the past 9 months, Domo has had a controlled release with a number of enterprise companies. “The hit rate has been high of people who want it pay for it,’ he says. And the product is aimed at large enterprises as opposed to small businesses.

“We’ve been testing the market through an early adopter program and the overwhelming response signals that we’ve tapped into a major pain point for CEOs and other executives. Today, we can’t install customers fast enough. We are scheduling customers weeks out and have a two-month waiting list for our beta product,” James said. The new funding will also be used towards sales and marketing efforts. The company plans to reveal more news in the next few months including names of large global customers and more details behind its products and strategy

The business analytics software market set to hit $33.9 billion in 2012, and is only expected to grow in the coming years. James is taking on the likes of giants like Oracle, Microsoft, and others, but clearly he has a proven track record of creating lasting and valuable companies. And investors agree.

Below is video of James talking at the Web 2.0 Summit last Fall and another one showing how the Fort Worth Police Department is using Domo:

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Here at the 2011 Crunchies, Imgur, the photo-sharing site made popular by the Reddit community, won the category of “Best Bootstrapped Startup.” And given the traffic numbers the startup is seeing, it’s easy to see why. According to Founder Alan Schaaf, the site sees 30 million uniques per month and a billion pageviews. (Yes, a billion!)

Schaaf admits that the startup is sort of  ”under the radar in the tech community.” But there’s clearly a large demand for an image-hosting site that doesn’t focus on personal or professional photos, but on other types of images.

“I like to think of an image as different from a photo,” says Schaaf, “you would put your photos on places like Facebook or Flickr, but if you just have an image – which can be like a screenshot, a meme, something you hacked together in PhotoShop – you need a place for those too. We want to be that place.”

The full backstage interview is below:

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It’s increasingly difficult to build buzz around new mobile application studios, especially when the first app on deck is something thousands of others have attempted, like a “To Do” app. Yet that’s exactly what Phill Ryu and David Lanham, the two masterminds behind Impending, Inc. have managed to do.

Ryu and Lanham are longtime members of the Mac and iOS development communities. Ryu’s past projects include MacHeist, The Heist and his work at tap tap tap. Lanham is a visual designer and artist, creator of the famed Twitterrific icon and is well-known for his work at the Iconfactory.

Last week, the pair formally launched Impending, their new app venture, alongside a teaser for their first app, Clear. Clear is a new to-do list app for iPhone and iPod touch that they’re developing in conjunction with the team at Realmac Software.

So why is Clear getting so much buzz? Check out the teaser video that has already racked up 312,000 plays in just four days:

Clear features a unique new UI and interaction scheme that raises the bar for mobile apps. I’ve been beta testing it and can attest that the video is an accurate reflection of the overall experience.

We had a chance to talk to Phill Ryu about Impending, his plans for the future and the design inspirations for Clear.

On His Future at Tap Tap Tap

“Well you know, John and Scott and I are still good friends and I am still a partner at tap tap tap. But there’s no question Impending is my focus right now. I think you will see some really cool stuff out of tap tap tap and maybe even some neat things in collaboration, but Impending is definitely the place for me and David to work on some more personal projects.

Tap Tap Tap is its own steam engine right now and David and I want to take a break in a slightly different direction, and you are going to see some really cool things come out of it.”

Design Inspiration

What separates Clear from the crowded space of to-do list apps is its design and overall user interface. According to Ryu, the Impending team was influenced by Push Pop Press’s work on the Our Choice app, Loren Brichter’s work with Tweetie and Microsoft’s Metro UI.

On the subject of Push Pop Press, a company Facebook acquired in August, Ryu tells us:

“They did some amazing things there, and you can see a lot of its influence in Clear’s lack of UI chrome and reliance on intuitive 1:1 touch and dragging interactions. And of course you can see an even more literal inspiration in iBooks textbooks.”

One of Push Pop’s engineers was Austin Sarner, who Ryu describes as becoming “completely obsessed with springs” thanks to his work on a proprietary physics engine while at Push Pop.

It just so happens that Sarner is also one of Ryu’s roommates and was able to provide his own feedback on the app.

Another developer who inspired Clear was Loren Brichter. Brichter created the iPhone app Tweetie. In 2010, he sold Tweetie to Twitter and the app became the official iPhone client. Brichter was also responsible for Twitter for iPad and Twitter for Mac.

Although Brichter left Twitter in late 2011, his influence is still visible in many parts of the site and in the new version of the iPhone app. Brichter’s greatest impact on the wider iOS developer ecosystem was the invention of “pull-to-refresh.” Ryu calls Brichter “a creative thunder ball” and pays homage to the developer in his app.

“In Clear,” Ryu explains “we have a color heatmap that shows your item priorities. Well, sometimes you need to put in an item in the middle of the list, and to do that in our app you just pinch the list apart, and in pops a new item. That’s our homage to pull-to-refresh. We call it pinch-to-insert.”

Perhaps the most surprising influence is Microsoft and its Metro UI.

According to Ryu, Clear co-creator Dan Counsell’s first UI mockup of Clear was “a more directly Metro inspired visual style.” “Over time,” says Ryu “we pushed away from it to settle in our own sweet spot of fit and form and function, but you can see parts of it there, and we’re proud of it. Metro is great. Clear is just better.”

Ryu has an open invitation to anyone on the Metro team to the Clear beta.

Ultimately, Ryu says that the goal with Clear was to “build on the shoulders of some of the best parts of our favorite cutting edge interface designs” and to “add our own stuff where it made perfect elegant sense.” The net result, according to Ryu, is “something truly from the future.”

From my time with the app, Clear has a great look and more importantly, a great user interface. We look forward to seeing what Clear and the Impending team have planned for the future.

More About: clear, david lanham, impending, interview, mobile app development, phill ryu, todo list

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