Check out Wood Camera
With great pleasure I would like to introduce to you an app Tapmates has worked on intensively with Bright Mango during the last 3 months. Yesterday our friends from Bright Mango released Wood Camera, an app that has made it to TOP 120 in paid apps in the US AppStore on it’s first day.
Some might say it’s “just another photo app” in a segment which already has a clearly defined king. We however believe that Wood Camera will not have to be ashamed standing next to the king and that it will find it’s way to a nice user base. Yesterday’s success on AppStore has confirmed that the extra effort has been worth it.
Apple’s iPhone is one of the most frequently used digital cameras on the market — That’s largely thanks to all the great apps you can find on the AppStore for the purpose of taking and editing photographs. The goal with Wood Camera was to build a very fast app for taking and editing photographs with an intuitive flow for applying different effects which would allow all the photos to look just great.
There has been plenty of time invested into this app. Our team of developers worked closely with John and Zack from the Bright Mango team. Martin and Dan, led by Petr and our star designer Jackie have done a great job, backed-up by our tester Ondra and project guru Mirek.
Now we just have to hope that you, users, will like the app as much as we do, so we can enjoy the feeling of a well done job.
You can download the app on the Wood Camera site. Enjoy!
P.S.: Do you want to be a part of our team and work on first class apps? Let us know…
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Piictu is here!
You can find more information about Piictu and the idea behindon it’s website. Enjoy!
iPad Smart Cover video (uncut)
The current notification system in iOS is lacking to say the least. Only one notification is shown at a time so its not very useful—especially on the lock screen.
The unveiling of the iPad 2 along with Shawn Hickens wonderful redesign sparked our interest in the current system. I had some fun over the weekend and came up with a new look for when the Smart Cover is in place.
Many thanks to Michal, Jindrich and Matej.
The video is available on YouTube and Vimeo and here is a full-size screenshot.
“Tweetmate”
It brings us great sadness to announce that we will no longer be pursuing Tweetmate.
As much as we want it to come to life, devoting precious resources is too much of a risk right now. The Iconfactory recently announced version 4 of Twitteriffic and we’re sure Loren Brichter has something up his sleeve.
With that said, we think it’s fair to show the full UI, and give a peek at what’s to come. Just to be clear, we aren’t looking for anyone to take the reins and continue development.
UPDATE: The very first mockup (before OS X Lion was introduced) with iOS-like TabBar.
Now for our future. We’ve been working on an iPad app for over 5 months that will truly change the way you get news. We can’t say much now, but there will be an official announcement in a month or two. Remember to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter!
To Clarify
Yesterday’s post regarding the Instagram facelift brought us both positive and negative feedback. We would like to explain what our intention was.
At Tapmates, we use Instagram every day. Our employees are all over the world, so it’s an awesome way to see what their homes look like. The more we used it, the more we thought about how the interface wasn’t at it’s full potential (from our point of view). Saying something is one step, doing it is the next, so after a couple days, we had our facelift. We loved it, but were curious to see what others thought. To be honest, we didn’t expect this much feedback, but are happy you like our work!
As mentioned, the goal was just to show what we think Instagram should look like. We’re not saying ours is the best, or even good, but it’s what we think it should be. If people continue to redesign Instagram and provide feedback, hopefully the founders will take action.
If the Instagram team want’s to use something from our facelift, we would love to give it to them for…
FREE.
An open letter to Instagram
Instagram is one of the hottest photo sharing apps on the App Store right now. There’s one problem: it doesn’t look that great. At Tapmates, we take pride in our icons and user interfaces, so we decided to mock-up what it would look like if we made it. Keep in mind that this is for personal reasons—Instagram did not hire us to do so.
If you would like to see a better design as much as we do, please Retweet this post and spread the word! Without further ado.
Click the image to view full size or download Retina-ready mockups. Cheers!
UPDATE: We would like to explain what our intention was.
Slevomat.cz sets a new standard
Online mass shopping has gained popularity in the Czech Republic. The online retailer Slevomat.cz is a pioneer among other online retailers; it is obvious now that there was a hole in the market. Nowadays we see a plethora of news about online mass shopping. Proof of this can’t be any clearer, it is estimated that there are around 80 websites offering discounts on products and services. Even the small Czech market can be extremely broadened.
The number is unbelievable, but little by little this market will consolidate. Amateur entrepreneurs are beginning to fall off since it is really tough to keep up with the market leader. Especially when Slevomat.cz does everything to be the number one. I feel that they are taking over the market and other companies are slipping away.
The last step for consolidating Slevomat’s privileged position is joining the AppStore. We were honored to help them with this task. Thereby, I want to introduce our latest app, exclusively for the Czech AppStore, Slevomat.cz for iPhone!
I am excited to see how our competition will react. I don’t think that there are many players who can afford investing in quality iPhone application that attract users effectively. I believe that since Slevomat.cz has become the market leader for the Czech, the same way would follow Slevomat´s application. We hope that they won’t get so rapt by the first numbers of using which will be certainly impressive and will pay attention for iPhone users for the future. We already have got lots of ideas which should be in app. This should bring maximum comfort for Slevomat.cz application users.
For now keep your fingers crossed so our application finds the satisfied users and constructive reviews which will help to move the application forward. I hope our application will be protected against loudmouth and chronic critics. Even though I shudder at bad reviews, I must admit that we all have to welcome them in order to improve our service and applications.
We hope that Slevomat.app won’t be the black sheep of the family and will achieve the same success as our previous applications have. This is a sign that Czech AppStore is becoming attractive for the big players and we can expect more Czech high quality applications available in the near future. We are very much looking forward to it.
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Dribbblr in your language
We have received a lot of great feedback on Dribbblr since launch. One of the most common was localization. Thanks to the small amount of text, we decided to give translating a try. We started out with a handful of the most common languages, and will hopefully expand from there.
Version 1.0.2 was an un-planned update, containing translations in: French and Dutch. We hope to get again a little bit closer to all our app’s beloved users. The only thing we can not translate are the dribbble shots, you have to find your own way of understanding them 
Related to this step, we would like to build up a stable network of co-workers who would be helping us with localizing our apps into other languages. If that sound’s interesting for you and you would like to help us with iPhone/iPad and Mac apps just let us know. All we require is that you speak english and love Apple products as much as we do. Drop us a line via the comment form bellow or mention @tapmates on Twitter.
We are looking mainly for Chinese, Spanish, German and Japanese translators, but will consider others if users are interested. We will be happy to hear from you and believe that together we can make our apps even better!
We’ve got a classified package
BREAKING NEWS: This morning at 8:00 CET, an employee of the Bureau Of Secret Apps delivered a highly classified package to Tapmates HQ. After the pyrotechnician, Petr, deemed the package to be safe, we opened it and it’s contents were unveiled. Multiple classified blueprints and source code for a new app, codenamed 004, have been discovered. Our intel says it will be deployed early 2011.
One of intelligence our agencies, Apple, has started the countdown for the official deployment of the Mac AppStore. It’s less then 90 days away.
Attached below is a piece of evidence which hints at what will be deployed with the new store:
If you have any more intelligence or questions, please use the comment form below. They will be electronically submitted to Tapmates HQ and evaluated for authenticity. Also, remember to subscribe to our newsletter to receive more info!
No employees were harmed during the meeting.
Our enemies might try and sabotage the launch, so hide yo kids, hide yo wife!
Dribbble Contest Winners
First off I’d like to thank everyone who participated. We were overwhelmed with the amount of quality wallpapers that were submitted. Unfortunately we could only pick 3 to win the invites. Ladies and gentlemen, the winners of the Dribbble invite are…