Month: June 2013

  • Introducing TypeMetal

    I’m delighted to announce the release of Coherence Labs’ very first app — a groundbreaking HTML editor for the Mac called TypeMetal, that’s now available on the Mac App Store.

    TypeMetal Application Icon

    At TypeMetal’s core is an innovative new editing engine, a year and a half in the making. Built atop WebKit’s heavily field-tested parsing, layout, and rendering foundation, TypeMetal’s editing functionality provides a suite of precise, fully undoable operations designed to work intuitively and give you full control down to the last element and character. Most remarkable of all, TypeMetal provides this degree of control while you work with fully rendered pages, not with HTML markup.

    Developing TypeMetal has been a labor of love — a much-enjoyed challenge of building an app that I couldn’t wait to use myself — and I’m thrilled to finally be able to release it to the world for others to use and enjoy.

    In addition to the summary and 60-second intro video on the product page, you can browse TypeMetal’s entire User Guide — the same in-app Help that comes with TypeMetal — online. One of the best parts of this project has been getting to write TypeMetal’s User Guide … using TypeMetal!

    Now that the wraps are off, I’ll be posting here more often — offering tips and bits of conceptual background that will help you get to know TypeMetal and its capabilities, and learn how to leverage them to greatest advantage. I’ve also added a public support forum to the site. It’s the place to go to get questions answered, report surprises, and send us feedback. And for quick questions, you can also reach us on Twitter @CoherenceLabs.

    I truly hope TypeMetal will delight people. I’ll be spending the next few weeks making sure its pioneering first users are happy with their purchase and any serious issues that arise get resolved quickly. From there out, I have many more great improvements in mind for the future. I am absolutely dedicated to making TypeMetal the best it can be, and an app people enjoy using. Stay tuned to our RSS feed — there’s more to come soon!

  • TypeMetal’s Icons

    Among TypeMetal’s many noteworthy features, I’m especially proud of one of the most visible — its stunningly beautiful app and snippet set icons, which were designed by the extraordinarily talented artists at Ramotion.

    For TypeMetal’s app icon, I wanted to clearly convey its identity as an HTML editor, and more broadly as a writing tool, while also making clear that TypeMetal was designed for the Mac from the ground up. I’m delighted by the way the end result achieves that with elegant simplicity, while looking right at home on OS X.

    TypeMetal Application Icon

    Snippet sets are a key feature of TypeMetal, and I wanted them to get first-class treatment too. The icon for this file type needed to convey a sense of fun as well as utility. I wanted to give the feeling of a kit of parts from which to build things — something one would find a bit of delight in downloading, opening, exploring, and using to make neat stuff. The box-of-brackets metaphor that Ramotion came up with does so beautifully.

    TypeMetal Snippet Set Icon

    You can find Ramotion on Dribbble and on Twitter. Thanks, guys, for the truly amazing work you’ve done for TypeMetal!