I’m here. I’m back. For the time being at least. School is still ongoing – my last exam is May 1 and then commences my full time summer job where I get to plan a University event (and create their website!). So I’m still very busy and it’s hard for me to get into a comfortable enough space that will allow me to write something of use. After May 1st, however, things will change. I’ve just had two exams on Tuesday so the free air is so very close! Until then.
P.S. I was totally excited when I got my Macheist bundle. Totally excited. Yay for Hit List and World of Goo!
This is it everyone! Minium was once a teaser on deviantART and was scheduled never to be released by the original artist Sekkyumu, which was a sad day indeed. But recently, after searching through some popular icons at the DA, I found that the most popular “icon” was a new set called Minium, this one created by German artist, RADE8. I immediately didn’t recognize it when I downloaded it but after applying it, I knew it was the same. Minium is a huge icon replacement set featuring over 150 icons, mostly metallic with some embossed and colourful icons to boot. Although they’re amazingly done, the sad part is that they are not at a 512 resolution (128 max), there are no bonus folder icons (which I always appreciate!), nor is there a Candybar file. However, what I do like about the set is the variety of the the drive icons, toolbar icons, and random favourites like a floppy disk, memory stick, superdisk, and the alternate text icon (read closely that one!).
Click the preview to visit deviantART and download!
Using really simple techniques, I’ve created my first wallpaper in Photoshop! It’s super simple and I like to think it looks good – it matches the general look of my iPod as well. The desgin was essentially a spash of colour on a rather colourless yet elegant background.
If you choose to use it, I’d love to see it on your desktop; maybe you can post a link! Anyway, it’s a 1280 x 800 resolution image, so sorry for anyone who doesn’t use this format. It’s my first wallpaper so it isn’t fully featured yet!
Let me know what you think!
Click to enlarge and download
There’s a new Browser in town, Safari 4 Beta. I read over the features and was excited by what I saw. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you’ll get when you download it.
- Top Sites – Look at your top sites in a snazzy grid view and click on any one to visit that site.
- Cover Flow — Browse through your history and bookmarks like you would in iTunes or Finder
- Full History Search — Type in your keywords and get results in Cover Flow style
- Nitro Engine — Javascript is said to start 30x faster than IE7 and 3x faster than Firefox.
- Tabs On Top — Tabs now don’t take up your favourite’s space because they’re now right at the top of the window
- Windows Native Look and Feel — Windows users will find that their copy of Safari 4 beta looks and feels like any other Windows app, including Windows fonts; however with the same engine as the Mac version.
- Cosmetic changes — You’ll notice everything looking a little brighter and lighter. Bright is good.
I like the top sites idea and it’s executed well except I wish I could manually choose the sites by typing and saving a URL. Also, I’m still not convinced with the look of the new Tabs position on Safari’s window. They’re so far away and I definitely need to get used to that. One last thing I miss is the progress bar that fills while the webpage loads. It’s been replaced with a spinning animation with no feedback as to how much the page has loaded. It’s not really helpful because you can’t tell if a page hangs the moment it happens, you have to wait until your patience runs out while loading to hit CMD+R.
Anyway, I’ll give it a couple of days and of course, it’s still beta so hopefully some things change. Now, go get it!
Long time it’s been, eh? That’s because my courses at university and other responsibilities have been taken up a lot of my time. I recently got a new job at my university that put me in charge of developing the website for an upcoming event. I’m really excited because it’s the first time I get to design logos, icons, and websites and get paid for it!
The tools I’ve been assigned to use are Dreamweaver CS4 and Flash CS4. These of course will be added to my Photoshop CS4 and GIMP. I’ve never used these apps for professional purposes before; I’ve always just tinkered with PS and GIMP for my own personal projects and enjoyment. I’ve only used Flash and Dreamweaver in High School a number of years back so I definitely need to dust off and polish my aging abilities with those apps. I’ll be asked now to push the limits of my imagination, creativity, and technical smarts with this job and I know I’ll do myself proud!
If I’m happy enough with my work and feel comfortable sharing, I’ll definitely put some imagery here and links to show off my work!
Extended exposure to Candybar and deviantART leads people to spend too much time in front of their monitors. But then again, there’s no way you would be able to transform your desktop into a visually appealing space; something that flows nicely and something that is completely unique to you. When you find those perfect icons for your apps, you begin to create a look and feel for your Dock that you never thought could happen. You’ve seen other people’s docks and always gawked. But now it’s time you designed your own. It was my turn. So, after a lot of searching, a little photoshopping here and there, and some determination, I can finally say that I’m happy with the way my Dock looks. And for that matter, my Taskbar isn’t too shabby either!
Click to enlarge
In my previous post, I said that I recently got Candybar and over the past couple of days, I’ve downloaded many many icons and docks and have been testing them out. I thought I’d share some of the ones that I really liked.
Click to visit
The first thing is a Dock replacement. I usually use SuperDocker to switch my docks but since I found it when looking for things to put into Candybar, it gets a place in this post. The dock skin is called Nameless and is easily found in deviantART and under many people’s “Favourites” section. It’s simple, small, and black with tiny white triangular indicators. Try it.
Click to visit
The second is called Presto, named so after Disney-Pixar’s short animated film. Great for any apps responsible for “magically” transforming something into something else, an audio or video conversion app. Myself, I use this iconset for Pic2Icon, an app that I’ve talked about before, an app that takes any image file and creates it into a file that can be used as an icon. I always use this application, and now even more with my icon-downloading frenzy! All in all, Presto offers 8 different combinations of magic hat, magical dust, magic wand, and bunny ears to create a set that you can’t afford to miss.
Click to visit
The final set to bring to your attention is Bowtie in the 70s. It’s a little sad that there aren’t many more Bowtie icons available; but then again, the original and the Christmas versions are just so great as they are! Also, it takes a little extra imagination to come up with a completely different concept for the Bowtie icon. That said however, Delta909 has done an amazing job of recreting 70s styled tuxedos for the CD to wear. Those looking for a change of clothes should check it out. There are a total of 9 different bowties for Bowtie.
Enjoy!
P.S. This is my 100th post so yay me! 
A couple of days ago, I opened up Cydia and I found LiveTime and I’ll admit, I didn’t jump to it right away. At first, I thought it was another one of those clock widgets that sit on your springboard and tell you the time. Today, I was perusing my RSS feeds when I came across a review of the app and I obviously realized that I was dead wrong about this thing!
LiveTime is an animated icon that gives you the real time and sits over your existing clock icon; complete with rotating hours, minutes, and seconds hands. Once installed, you’ll notice that your clock icon now has an overlay of an analog clock that ticks away the time. If you go into Winterboard, you’ll see that you can turn on a LiveTime theme. If you SSH into your Themes folder and into the LiveTimes folder, you can replace the original stock clock icon with any blank clock icon you want to match the theme you’re using.
What I like about LiveTime is that it does it’s job without distracting you. But there are a few things that I would like to see changed: the ability to manipulate the length of the arms if the clock since some clock icons are smaller than the stock icon (like my own). I realize that I could manually do this buy haven’t found it yet! I would also like to see this widget being applied to the Weather app icon to get real time temperature updates right on the icon. That would be cool!
Live Time is available for free in Cydia under the iSpazio repository.
