I’ve gone a little dark on the blog lately, mostly due to a suddenly very busy schedule (a good thing for our small team of one at Pixel Lab World Headquarters). I’m excited, though, to share a little about at least one project I’ve been working on: Seesmic for Windows which was announced today at the PDC.

I helped out with the UX on this one, doing a lot of the design work and much of the UI implementation in the Windows / WPF version. What a fun project. Seesmic has been great to work with: really talented engineers and super passionate leadership.

Seesmic, of course, already had a solid app going into the project, and much of the design process was about keeping the good from the current app in tact. They’ve had, after all, a whopping 3 million downloads in 6 months.  Also, Seesmic has got special appeal with twitter pros (the guys who manage multiple accounts and tweet blindfolded) and we felt that it was critical that we not take anything away from them.

On the other hand, we we wanted to evolve the UI so that it felt native, clean and beautiful on Windows.  That resulted in things like the integration with Windows glass and the updated visual design. We also wanted the app to look and feel really lightweight and ultimately, much of my job was to keep the UI quiet so the focus of the app would be the content.

The design will continue to evolve, but here you can see the current app next to the new. I’m excited about the direction.

Well, It’s been an exciting day. There’s been good coverage about the app, including stories from TechCrunch and Mashable and a nice write up on the Windows Experience Blog. You can read more about the new and planned features there (including a very exciting plugin model that .NET developers won’t want to miss). To download the beta, you need to join team Seesmic. I think that may be Seesmic’s way of reminding you that this is still a beta! If you try it out, I’d love to know what you think.