According to a story at the Microsofty news site ActiveWin, frog design (don’t you hate companies who’s names are all lower-case?) was involved in the design of Microsoft’s new Windows Media Player look and the new Windows XP flag logo.

I also discovered recently that icon design gurus IconFactory designed the new Windows XP icons. They are very pretty (although, as I’ve said before, simply maaaaan). This crew also made a nice transition from the pixel-perfect to the new big-ass smooth Mac OS X icons for Audion (also see their gallery of other OS X icons – some of the nicest I’ve seen – be sure and check out all of the ‘client samples’).

frog has long been a not-so secret weapon of Steve Jobs, having worked on a slew of early Apple and Macintosh products as well as the infamous NeXT (more company capitalization) machines.

I remember years ago walking in to a local computer store with my good friend Dan and the cheque from our small business loan in hand. We needed two high-end desktops – which at the time that meant Pentium 200’s with MMX with 32MB of RAM. As soon as we saw them, we knew which ones we had to have. A (then) beautiful sleek black minitower with matching mouse, keyboard, and monitor. They were Acer Aspires, but we later found out they were one of the PC worlds earliest non-beige boxes and they were designed by frog. I still have the matching phone at my appartment.

I also remember being amazed and confused by the wonderful inclusion of the Buddy Holly video by Weezer on the Window 95 CDROM.