We have devoted the last few releases of Netizen to improving its reliability and convenience features so that it would be more appropriate for day-to-day use. Visually, however, the look of the application has stayed pretty stagnant since Beta Release 3. We realized we needed some outside help to make Netizen’s beauty match its brain.

Luckily, we ran into Anthony Casalena of SquareSpace fame at a local nextNY event over the summer. As you may already know, our blog is hosted by Squarespace. We have looked at every open source blogging and CMS system out there and SquareSpace is hands down the most polished and user-friendly. So we asked Anthony to recommend a designer that can help us bring Netizen up a few notches in the visual department. Anthony wholeheartedly recommended Wolfgang Bartelme of Bartelme Design to help with this project. (Thanks for the referral, Anthony!) Wolfgang has been working with us during the last couple of months on re-conceptualizing and re-skinning the Mac version of our applicaton. We feel that this new design is what we need to be more user friendly and to match the polish of the Mac OS X platform.

Without further ado, here is a sneak preview of the next major version of Netizen:

Icons

 

We refreshed our icon set to include more graphical representations of our basic Send, Pickup and Track functions. These icons are supposed to look like the shipping boxes/envelopes you would normally use to pack your documents or binders with FedEx or DHL.

Buttons

Tiger or Leopard? Apple seems to be changing the look-and-feel of the OS native buttons from the candy color version in Tiger to the matte treatment in Leopard. Mozilla has the capability to support custom button treatments through CSS. We are planning to take advantage of it and implement our own button theme as shown above. Anthony suggested that this look-and-feel may even work for our Windows version and we pretty much agree. Unifying the two platform themes will save us a lot of development effort.

Download Manager

We were looking for the best download management user interface in Mac land. It didn’t take us too long to find Xtorrent by David Watanabe. We tried to synthesize the current feature set of Netizen with Xtorrent’s single-page, list-detail model. The above picture shows the treatment of a selected item within the list of active parcels. As for the parcel details treatment, we have gone from:

to:

Much nicer, huh?

More to come

As we continue to redesign the user interface we will give more in depth previews of what we are planning for future versions of Netizen. (Those of you that met with us at Techcrunch 8 may have already seen full screenshots of new features that we can’t share publicly on our blog yet.) We would love to hear any feedback about these new designs before committing them to our code base. Please take some time to comment on our blog or send us an e-mail with your suggestions, gripes, or insights. Thanks!