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.
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.
Yellowsn0w, the Dev Team’s jailbreaking software, has been received with open arms by iPhone owners/jailbreakers this New Years. The team has been working very hard and very long to bring everybody this exploit. However, one guy, Jody Sanders, decided to take all the credit for himself when he illegally put it up for sale on his website. This idiot decided that he would host the jailbreak on his website, pass it off as his own (renaming to make sure it was “his”), and charge people £19.99 for it! His site read:
“We can now fully unlock the iPhone 3G for use on any GSM network for just £19.99 DIY (£49.99 in-store at either London or Birmingham) – just in time for the release of the iPhone 3G PAYG in the UK (available from Carphone Warehouse and o2).”
Honestly, how stupid does he think he is? Needless to say that the Dev Team is not at all happy about this and neiter are the thousands of people that use the Dev Team’s jailbreaking methods. I myself don’t own an iPhone but I know that I felt pretty angry when I read this. And the funny thing is, he’s tried it before! No word yet if the Dev Team is working on facing him legally since it’s difficult to get his real identity and what course of action they would need to follow if they do nab him. If you have any comments to this, or can help, you can email them at blog@iphone-dev.org.
If you want to read more about this incident – 1, 2, 3, 4
You can also read the Dev Team’s post about it here.
Update: Another fool in India is doing the same thing, only his price isn’t listed. They do however offer “special price for or existing customers” so “Hurry Up !! Get Unlocked your Iphone Immidiatly.” FAIL.
Mac artist extraordinaire, Louie Mantia, has recently released a collection of UI goodies to satisfy all. Designed after Disney-Pixar’s WALL-E, the set includes drive icons in both the style of WALL-E himself and EVE, a matching Dock replacement, and a nice wallpaper. Not much to say really, except that if this is your cup of tea, then you have excellent taste in tea! Visit Iconfactory to pick them up.
The wallpaper can be picked up on Iconfactory but from a different page.
I know this isn’t the best “first post of the year” but the reason I’m writing this post really made my day. As you may know from my previous post, I own a Sandisk Cruzer USB flash drive to quickly share files around my friends and family. It’s been slowly filling up over the time I’ve had it and it’s come to a point where I’ve begun to erase stuff to make space for new things. Now, I’ve only had to delete small things in the past but I’ve recently had to make more room to transfer some movies and songs. I went ahead and deleted stuff to make that space but it seemed that no matter what I deleted, no extra space was being created! The “Available Space” was a frozen number that refused to increase no matter what I deleted. I ejected the drive and re-inserted it, I double checked that I had actually deleted the files, I did everything I could but nothing worked.
Now, I have to mention that I’ve had this flash drive before my Mac so I had no idea that the obstacle I was facing was actually because I didn’t know how deleting things off of flash drives work on a Mac. I soon realized that when you delete something off a flash drive, it goes to your drive’s “.Trashes” folder, which essentially is a virtual folder that is controlled by your Mac’s Trash. If you want to permanently delete the files you’ve “deleted” on your flash drive, all you need to do is empty the Trash – the one on your Dock. The solution was so simple, I can’t believe I missed it!
So where you have it. If there’s anyone out there who needed that, you’re welcome! Just plug in your flash drive, delete unwanted files, EMPTY YOUR TRASH, and eject.
Happy New Year everybody! I can’t believe I’ve let it been this long since I’ve written anything here. Shame on me! All I can say is that my holiday break has been filled with meeting up with friends that I haven’t seen in a long time and a lot of relaxing and enjoying in the free time. I’ve actually been pretty absent on the internet (my Mac, even) since the beginning of the my holiday and found over 200 new entries when I loaded up my RSS reader a couple of days ago. It’s insane to try and catch after such a long time away!
But for now, I just wanted to wish everybody reading this a happy and healthy 2009! I hope that the new year brings you a bigger and better last year. iPodMac hopes to cover the new year in the best way possible and to bring out even more things to your attention. And with MWSF coming up next week, that’s a pretty solid guarantee, especially since it will be Apple’s last time as attendee. Also, and off record, I hope to have a new author contribute to this blog sometime in the near-future but that’s still in the works and will be until further notice. (Shhh! That was supposed to be a secret!)
Take care,
The Author
I happened on a website with some really unique and amazing works. One that really caught my eye was called Yoritsuki, a theme based on a Japanese inn and hot spring. The icons and desktops in the set are absolutely beautiful and truly a sight to see. I can’t believe I’ve never seen this guy’s work before! Here’s an abstract from the artist, Masaki Hoshino:
This file contains 35 icons [and 2 desktops] that are associated with hot springs in Japan. If you haven’t stayed in a Japanese-style inn, you may be unfamiliar with these designs, but they’re familiar to Japanese. Elaborate, detailed, unique icons drawn in 128×128-pixel format will make your desktop delightful.
If you have an opportunity to visit Japan, please consider staying at a Japanese-style hot spring inn. You may see what I’ve picture in my icons. Please be aware that Yoritsuki is the name of a fictional Japanese-style inn.
His website, HYBRID WORKS, has tons more of really great stuff to check out. And even if you don’t find anything you like, you’re bound to be mesmerized by the site itself and the music that plays in the background; especially now that he’s put a new Christmas themed opening images. A
Add to the Yoritsuki suite with another one of Masaki Hoshino’s works, Sakura, for a more complete set. Don’t miss out on this one!
