Lifelike Alarm Clock is the most beautiful alarm clock and weather app ever designed for the iPhone.
It will look great on your nightstand and is also easy to use and full of clever features. Like gorgeous animated skies that match your current weather, a smart night mode that you access by pulling the shade and super-sized snooze buttons.

Since you’re visiting Mockapp.com you must own an iPhone… so stop reading this boring post and go try the app now. It costs only $1.99, part of which helps me feed my family and make stuff like Mockapp. Plus I guarantee you’ll love the app and you’ll see what can be done using Mockapp. Thanks in advance for the support!

Lifelike Alarm Clock and Weather HD

The iPhone version is coming soon (under review by Apple as I write). It was redesigned for the iPhone from the ground up… and guess what it was designed with.

1) The iPad is a completely different animal than the iPhone from a UI standpoint. Whereas the iPhone has a very “scripted” UI language with a lot of standard elements reused over and over in all apps, it’s not the case for the iPad. And that’s a great thing! Just look at Apple’s own apps: iBooks looks like a bookshelf and the books look like… books. Magical as Steve likes to say.  The much larger screen real estate allows app designers to take much more of a lifelike approach to app design. So I feel like giving app creators a bunch of prefabricated UI elements would limit their imagination in some way.

2) For most iPad standard UI elements, you can always use the iPhone version of Mockapp. Just paste them into a 1024×1024 canvas (to accomodate both landscape and portrait modes). Need to resize them? No problem: ungroup objects and resize all you want. That’s what I do for my own iPad app mockups and I’ve done quite a few lately. More on that soon, if Apple ends-up approving my apps that is.

3) Mockapp is not a business and I don’t plan on making it one. The Google ads you see barely pay for hosting. It was fun to put together the iPhone version when I had some downtime back in September 2009 and I’m glad it has helped (and is still helping) a ton of people. However unless my clients stop giving me consulting work in the near future or you want to pay me $150/hour to do it, I have no immediate plans to create future versions of Mockapp for iPhone or iPad. Sorry!

Now my shameless plug: If you’re a company who needs help designing a usable, engaging iPad (or iPhone) app, I can create your mockups and even teach your staff how to make future mockups in Keynote. The few clients I’ve trained have gained invaluable tools and knowledge they now use everyday to create great apps.

The answer is yes but I can’t get started quite yet: the way I made MockApp for iPhone/iPod Touch in the first place was by taking lots of screenshots of the various UI elements on my iPhone and then “drawing” over them in Keynote to ensure they were high-fidelity renderings of the real thing.

I obviously can’t do that with MockApp quite yet for the obvious reason that I don’t own an iPad. I’ll be first in line at the Apple store when the iPad comes out, camping overnight if I have to but that still 58 days away (yes, I’m counting the days!).

If anyone can place a good word with Steve and get me an iPad sooner, I promise I’ll whip out a MockApp for iPad in no time!

I must add that I’ve been quite annoyed with all the whiny so-called “mixed” reviews out there about the iPad, including some pretty embarrassing ones on NPR, which I otherwise adore. I guess journalists love counting features as much as Microsoft does and pretty much decide to ignore the human interaction revolution that the new format and gesture vocabulary introduce. They also have a very short memory: Go count the features of the original iPod compared to the feature-rich MP3 players it was competing with at the time and you get the idea of what’s about to happen with the iPad.

My personal opinion is that the iPad is the awesome first iteration of a device that will truly revolutionize how most people use computers in this decade. I’m willing to bet (and am betting in Apple stock right now!) that the tablet format will supplant all other forms of traditional computers including laptops, desktops, crapbooks, etc. within the next 10 years.

Can I get my iPad now, Steve pretty please?

The instructions to get your MockApp mockups on your iPhone are posted here.

As you’ll see, the process is pretty simple already but I’m still trying to simplify the process even more:

So if any of you smart iPhone app developers out there want to help, I’d love to collaborate:

Wouldn’t be cool to build a dedicated MockApp viewer app that users would sign-into and would automatically retrieve their mockups from the cloud? If we could avoid the PDF conversion, that would be sweet too: Maybe users upload their Keynote or ppt and the PDF conversion happens automatically on the server… OK, now I’m getting way to excited so I better stop.

Happy mockups!

So I managed to make a half-decent mockup* using MockApp and thought it would be fun to make this mockup into a video that actually looks like there is a finished Wave App out there.

Hopefully, it won’t freak people out: I’m sure Lars, Stephanie and the rest of the Wave team at Google have a good sense of humor! (I still want my Wave invite).

Anyway, I hope you like it and more importantly, I hope you’ll come up with your own version of Google Wave and email it in. I promise to publish mockups of the best Google Wave iPhone App ideas you send me.

* Considering I haven’t yet gotten a Wave invite yet, so I worked with what I had: random Flick’r screenshots and a few Youtube videos of Google Wave (a little like chasing Bigfoot). Thanks for all of you who offered to send me Google Wave invites! I did get one in the end.

This video has the advantage of being only 30-seconds-long without a peep from me (I’m sure your partner will appreciate that too)… and you can even dance to it.

Please do rate the hell out if these videos (positive I hope!) and feel free to repost all over the place.

So how much is Keynote ‘09 you ask? (OK, now I’m going to sound like I’m trying to sell you something but I guarantee I’m not making a penny on this) Amazon sells the whole iWork ‘09 suite for $57. That’s not just Keynote ‘09 with the advanced gradients and all. You get Pages ‘09 and Numbers ‘09 too. Or if you prefer, for about the same price you might be able to get a dusty copy of MS-Office 1997 for PC on eBay…