Welcome to a new section of our blog where we'll be highlighting the awesome designs behind some of Sourcebits most popular applications. There's a lot of work and love that goes into our creation process and we want to share that with the world.

In today's DesignThinking, we'll be highlighting a social, mobile app idea that we generated for a potential client and our thinking behind the design. The client wanted the app to feel inspired by traditional Japanese culture. Japanese design is known for it's simplicity and grace. We wanted to make sure these concepts were felt throughout the application. The design elements are expressed in a plain, simple and direct manner. The biggest challenge we faced was combining the essence of Japanese culture with the social the focus of the app.

Design Showcase Piece:

One of the most important aspects of the application was keeping realism at the forefront. We emphasized real-world objects over caricature or artistic interpretation to give the end-users an immediate sense of trust. Using familiar objects in design helps end-users immediately identify with and understand the interface design. Let's breakdown some of these main design elements.

Rice bowl and rice:

Four hand-painted layers for the rice and 10 vector layers for the bowl. The rice was painted in Photoshop using tiny, scatter brushes with two layers beneath it which contain shadows and depth for realism.

 
 Sake Bottle:

The bottle was created using 25 vector layers to make the lighting and shadows seem as realistic as possible. Adding shadows is a great way of giving objects a sense of depth.

 
We use vector objects to allow us the freedom to scale if necessary. We hand-painted the rice grains in order to achieve a life-like appearance. Warm color tones were used throughout the app to make sure the user experience felt austere and trustworthy but also friendly to use.

Please feel free to comment and we'll make sure one of our designers will answer you!

About Sourcebits: We are Sourcebits, a talented, international team of over 400 people. Sourcebits is a world leader in creating powerful cloud, web and mobile solutions for some of the world's biggest clients like Cisco, IBM, Intel, Adobe, Bank of America and many more. Sourcebits is backed by Sequoia Capital and IDG and is led by Rohit Singal, founder and CEO, and Piotr Gajos, head of design and an Apple Design Award winner.

Game on, sleepers – Night Stand HD 2 helps you wake up early and live healthy, and highlights Sourcebits' Windows 8 capabilities

San Francisco, CA – May 3, 2013 – Today, Spoonjuice, proven in-house app studio from global software design and development firm Sourcebits, is excited to unveil Night Stand HD 2 for the quickly growing Windows 8 platform.

Night Stand HD 2 has completely re-imagined the alarm clock experience by gamifying waking up in the morning. Available now on the Windows 8 Store, Night Stand HD 2 boasts an upgraded LCD clock interface, Aggressive Alarms feature, the stunning Polar Clock theme, and downright jaw-dropping visual appeal. It’s the time utility for a new generation of dreamers.

“We're building a strong reputation for delivering beautiful products on Windows 8," said Piotr Gajos, Head of Interaction Design Group at Sourcebits, “When we decided to bring this app to the platform, we had to live up to the reputation it has already earned on iOS in the App Store.”

Night Stand HD 2 offers fun new incentives for waking up on time. If you wake up early, you get points which unlock gorgeous new clock themes. Getting an early start to your day helps you make the most of it and Night Stand HD 2 promotes healthy living habits. In addition, you can brag about your achievements on Facebook and Twitter. However, if waking up early is not your thing, you’re able to purchase any of the themes for only $1-$2 each.

Another great new feature is Aggressive Alarm which puts you through patent-pending "get-your-brain-out-of-bed” puzzle. You'll love knowing it's there, even if you never sleep in since there’s no better way of starting the day then solving some fun challenges. You can even have the weather displayed so that you’ll immediately know what to expect when leaving your house.

SpoonJuice and Sourcebits have developed this app from the ground up to work beautifully on the Windows 8 platform. Soucebits’ engineers made sure that all the lasting appeal from the iOS app was lovingly transferred to the Windows 8 version.

Lastly, Night Stand HD 2 also features multiple repeating alarms, the ability to wake up to your own music auto-sleep music settings, customizable snooze, a world clock with multiple time zone support, a hyper-realistic stopwatch, and on-screen battery indicator. It's hands down the most complete and polished alarm clock app.

About Sourcebits: We are Sourcebits, a talented, international team of over 400 people. Sourcebits is a world leader in creating powerful cloud, web and mobile solutions for some of the world's biggest clients like Cisco, IBM, Intel, Adobe, Bank of America and many more. Sourcebits is backed by Sequoia Capital and IDG and is led by Rohit Singal, founder and CEO, and Piotr Gajos, head of design and an Apple Design Award winner.

The eventual demise of Netscape Navigator in the aftermath of a huge assault by Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) in the Browser Wars of the late 90s put JavaScript right in the middle of the front lines. If Twitter had been around then, #JS may have been the most popular hash tag!

JavaScript was created by Brenden Eich at Netscape in just 10 days. Developed under the codename Mocha, it officially came to life as "LiveScript”. It was rushed to market to compete with IE, and the creators made some bad design decisions, affecting its performance adversely, but it did a good job with what it had. At the same time, Java Applets was developed. For a while, the conventional wisdom was that that Java was going to be the language of the web, but JavaScript emerged victorious.

Today, about 15 years after the invention of JavaScript, it has had a resurgence, with Google’s release of the super-charged v8 JavaScript engine. JavaScript broke the browser barrier and stepped into the server-side scripting ecosystem. Node became one of the most watched projects on Github. When Node gained traction in programming for the web, naysayers complained that JavaScript, primarily a language of the browser, would not work well for server-side scripting. Node, however, went viral among developers who started using it extensively.

The major argument against Node, that JavaScript is slow, was turned on its head with v8 turning out to be faster than Ruby and Python. The naysayers should have blamed the DOM instead of the JavaScript, and JavaScript Ninjas like Doug Crockford and others have debated this out of contention.

For a JavaScript lover like me, it’s exciting that all major browsers-- Chrome and FireFox specifically-- are working hard to make their Javascript engines faster than ever. JavaScript is also being used to create cross-platform mobile applications with frameworks like Titanium and PhoneGap.

As an intermediate language, many new programming languages such as CoffeeScript and TypeScript are targeting JavaScript as their target language. Even I was motivated to create a language called ChocoScript which trans-compiles to JavaScript!

On another note, there has been a rush to create single page applications. These applications use JavaScript extensively and make use of Ajax rather than reloading whole pages. Powerful frameworks such as Backbone.js, Ember.js and the awesome Angular.js from Google have been developed to assist the developer in creating such applications. While these have been mostly for desktop browsers, increasingly we see JavaScript frameworks such as Sencha and JQuery becoming mainstream for mobile web development.

A developer today cannot afford to overlook JavaScript. JavaScript is breaking new ground in the desktop application space with Node-Webkit. Node-Webkit combines Node and the Chromium project to provide a way to create desktop apps using web technologies. With the advent of HTML5, JavaScript has replaced Flash for creating rich interfaces and writing awesome games for the browser.

JavaScript's future looks very bright, and developers are finding new ways to use it. It would be a technology of reckoning if a new standalone, synchronous runtime with abundant libraries appears, to create a stable, scalable and super fast web framework. JavaScript promises to be the de-facto language of choice for server-side development and could could even replace Lua as a standard language for scripting games.

JavaScript has been a hot topic of discussion over the past 15 years, and I am confident that it will continue to be one in the future.