Mike Matas going to Cupertino
, co-founder of Delicious Monster with Wil Shipley, is giving up on self-employment, packing up, and making the long drive from Seattle down to Cupertino, where he will be working on icon and human interface design for Apple. I think this is a good thing for Apple, and for us. Mike has won numerous design awards, and Delicious' flagship Delicious Library software is, well, really cool. I can't say I agree with everything Mike has to say about interfaces, but he's the form-follows-function kind of guy Apple needs right now. He's also fiendishly devoted to three things Apple really needs to work on for the next release: useability, interface consistency, and not calling a beta "1.0".
What this means for Delicious is anybody's guess, but Wil's weathered a lot—he was a director at Omni Group before he left to found Delicious with Mike—and he and Mike apparently worked out the road map for the 2.0 release before Mike made the decision to leave.
Best of luck, Mike.
[Thanks, Marvo!]
