This is exactly the kind of thing we love to see here at TUAW (and thanks for sending it along, Danny) -- Glyph of the Twisted project got a job offer from Apple last week, and over on his blog, he posts a set of unboxing pics. Which might sound silly (an unboxing for a new hire packet?), but when you're talking about Apple, it's worth it. It turns out they put nearly as much thought into the design of their paperwork as they do into the rest of their projects. From the iconic folder to the way it's organized, designed, and laid out, getting a job offer from Apple isn't just super exciting, it's apparently a thing of beauty.

To tell the truth, we half expected him to turn the folder over and see the words "Designed by Apple in California." Good luck to Glyph with his job, and it warms our hearts here as Apple fans at TUAW to see that something the company never expected to be shown to the public was assembled with such care and thought.

Part of my work requires me to mock up iPhone apps, often to show developers how I would redesign a user interface to work better than something they've come up with. Over the past few months, a number of paper sketchbooks have appeared on the market, all designed expressly for this purpose. I decided to try out all of the sketchbooks that I could find in a cursory Google search, just to see which one would work best for me. Of course, that meant that I had to write a review!

The three products I discovered and tested were App Sketchbook (US$16.99), iPhone Application Sketch Book (US$14.99), and The Developer Sketchbook for iPhone Apps (US$19.99). All of them are designed for the same reason, to let iPhone devs or business analysts describe how they want an application's user interface to look. Follow along as I take a look at these three sketchbooks, as well as a metal stencil template for drawing UI elements.

While it's been in the App Store for the last few days, Pantone is officially launching its color discovery and management app for iPhone today, called myPANTONE.

The Pantone Matching System, among other Pantone products, is the indispensable color system for printers and graphic designers, and it offers a wider gamut of color than traditional process color printing. myPANTONE lets iPhone and iPod touch users discover new and interesting Pantone color combinations, share them, and create palette files suitable for importing in desktop applications.

You can start one of two ways: You can scrub through one of Pantone's color sets, including PMS coated, uncoated and matte colors, Goe, Pastels, and Fashion + Home. You can then drag individual chips into an area below the fanbook display, and build a palette of five colors. You can view each color full-screen, and add tags to colors, too.

Alternatively, you can take a picture with your iPhone (or select an image from Pictures on your iPod touch) and build a palette from the colors in that image.

myPANTONE exports HTML colors and .ase files (suitable for importing in Adobe CS products). You can also share palettes directly with other myPANTONE users nearby, and also upload them to the mypantone.com website (annoying sound warning), which is very similar to Adobe's Kuler (though it uses Pantone swatches, naturally).

This is all well and good, of course, but for the technical color professional? Meh.

We've discussed Ten One Design's Pogo Stylus and Pogo Sketch before; they're great if you like to sketch and need a finer brush than your finger can provide.

Now the company has provided just the thing for the artistic members of our readership, and a good reason to show a booty shot on TUAW -- the new Hot Pink versions of the Pogo Stylus and Pogo Sketch.

While the model in this photo appears to have neatly manicured nails, our contact at Ten One Design says that many women with long, luscious nails have been buying the Pogos so they can keep those back scratchers and still be able to use the touch user interface of the iPhone and iPod touch.

The Pogos are also useful with the Autograph application. I use one with my MacBook Air to make my signature via the touchpad look a lot more like it's been done with a pen.

The hot pink anodized finish for the US$14.95 Pogo Stylus or Pogo Sketch joins the other colors: black, white, and my personal favorite, gunmetal. And yes, this is a slow news day...

Inspired by Bear Grylls's (of Discovery's Man vs. Wild) "make the most out of your situation" scenarios, I present you with a tutorial for making the most out of Preview.app. While not as powerful as graphics editing powerhouse Adobe Photoshop, Preview can oftentimes get you from Point A to Point B -- and sometimes quicker too.

Like Bear Grylls, you'll need to parachute out of a plane and into the house of a friend who doesn't have Photoshop -- just kidding.

First, a little bit of background. Preview comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, and it's the default image viewer on the system. For PC-to-Mac converts, you could think of it as the Microsoft Paint of OS X; except that it can do a whole lot more. Besides the ability to open a host of image file formats (JPG, BMP, GIF, among them, and even PSD and AI files), Preview can also open PDF files natively. I actually prefer it over Adobe Acrobat for opening PDFs, as I find that they open much quicker using Preview. And like Adobe Reader, Preview contains advanced features, such as annotating.

We reported the Infectious "Cut to the Core" design contest a while back, but the winners have just been announced and their designs are truly gorgeous. I rarely sticker my computers, but the Infectious skins are vinyl and won't leave a mess behind when you remove them. These designs are created to work around the glowing Apple logo on the top half of your notebook computers, and the winners really hit the mark.

Congratulations to Jun Nuñez who takes home first prize of $1000 for his vision of the Apple logo as the pulsing heart of a robot with ReCharged. Kudos as well to Aren Vandenburgh and his design "Creative Workflow, Dimo Trifonov and his old-school rainbow striped Back to Basics and to Jamal Issawi and his arcade game-inspired Mac Man.

You can buy the winners' designs directly from Infectious for your 13", 15" and 17" Mac laptops. Skins cost $29.99 each. Check out the winners in the gallery, below.

The Pixelmator team has released another update to my favorite little photo editor. Pixelmator 1.5 Spider brings a host of web exporting and sharing options, including a new "Save for Web" feature and the option to send a picture straight to Mail or iPhoto. Additionally, there's a new Trim tool that will cut off transparent or background pixels, and a new Slice tool that will let you cut an image up into pieces and optimize each for the 'net. There's also the usual round of bug fixes, including support for full compatibility with Snow Leopard.

As usual, the new version is available for update from right within the current app. For new users, Pixelmator is available for $59 over on their website, complete with a free trial if you want to check out this photo editing powerhouse before buying. I really enjoy using Pixelmator -- it's lightweight and easy to use, and while it's not quite as full-featured as Photoshop (though with every big version release like this, they get closer), it's a great app to do a little image editing in.

Over at his blog Cult of Mac, writer Leander Kahney published a post this morning featuring full-size 512 x 512 pixel screenshots of Mac icons. As he notes, the highly detailed icons are part of a move to make the OS resolution independent, but they're also an indication of Apple's attention to detail.

Many of the icons are works of art when viewed at their full size. The TextEdit icon, for example, is actually a note from "John Appleseed" to "Kate" featuring the text of the "Here's to the crazy ones" ads of the late 1990s. The Jar Launcher app, featuring a cup of hot Java sitting on a paper napkin, reveals miniscule bubbles on the side of the coffee, as well as real Java code written on the napkin.

All of these icons are indications of the fanatical attention to detail of Apple designers. After looking at Kahney's gallery of art, I gathered my own collection of icon goodness from both Apple and third-party apps. Click the gallery icon below to see what I found. If you have found any 512 x 512 icons that are incredibly good, send 'em to us at http://tuaw.tumblr.com/submit.

One of the dark spots hanging over the excitement over Snow Leopard is whether or not Photoshop CS3 will work.

Adobe caused some real consternation when they announced earlier this week that CS3 would get no support (along with the rest of the older Creative Suite) and suggested people upgrade to CS4.

In an Adobe FAQ [PDF download link] it's stated: "Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested,and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution."

Then there was some backtracking from John Nack, Adobe Photoshop product manager. "It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard."

Hmmm. So will it work? People have invested a fortune in Adobe products. Some users who have used CS3 says it runs OK with late beta releases of Snow Leopard, but others have said there are a lot of problems. I've heard both stories from people using it, and remember, Adobe isn't saying CS4 is perfect either.

If I were making my living with Photoshop or other parts of the Creative Suite and was running CS3, I think I'd wait until there are a lot of user reports. Yes, CS3 has been out for a long time, and yes, Adobe would love to have us update to CS4, but in my case there are some critical plug-ins I use that haven't yet been updated to work with CS4, and I'm probably not alone.

Here's a link to John Nack's blog where some customers are commenting none too happily about Adobe right now.

I expect this issue is going to get a lot of attention when people start upgrading to Snow Leopard. Stand by.

Blue Crowbar Software is a small Belgian Mac development firm that is quickly making a name for itself for its innovative iPhoto and Aperture plugins. We've previously covered iPhoto2Twitter here on TUAW, and now Blue Crowbar has announced a new iPhoto plugin for adding watermarks to pictures in your iPhoto library.

Watermarks are those faint, transparent designs that websites often use to mark exclusive photos when breaking a big story. For example, many of the great fake iTablet "photos" that we've received during the past few weeks have been emblazoned with a watermark for one Mac site or another. Impression (€9.90 -- about US$14.10) works in iPhoto to put watermarks onto your iPhoto pictures. If you're worried that a watermark might ruin a perfectly good picture, don't be. Impression makes a copy of the picture, then creates a watermarked version which is also saved into your iPhoto library.

I haven't always loved art. During my life, I went through a phase where I think my engineer / logical-brain kicked the artist brain out of the nest. Now my wife and I are avid art collectors, and I'm writing this while on our annual tour of Santa Fe, New Mexico art galleries. The picture above is a panorama taken on August 6th from the Santa Fe Opera House using the outstanding Pano app for iPhone.

As part of our continuing Five Apps series, I decided to take on the challenging task of finding five applications for Mac and iPhone that would be useful to the art lover or collector. Read on for my take on the cream of the art crop.

It's been a while since Freeverse's vector application, Lineform, got an update. Lineform 1.5 came out in January 2008, but the Apple Design Award winner has remained unchanged since then. That's not a bad thing; as we've mentioned in the past, Lineform is great vector program. But it's always nice to get new features.

Freeverse has just released Lineform 1.5.1, fixing some bugs and adding some new treats for users.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Improved gradient behavior -- you now have more control over your gradients.
• Improved performance with multiple objects on a canvas
• Undo now includes the function name, so you can see what you are undoing
• New Lineform Clips available in the Media Browser.

That last item is actually pretty great. Lineform now comes with a bunch of vector clips in various shapes and symbols that you can drag into your documents to use as they are, or edit. You can also add additional vector clips to save and use later.

When Robert did a faceoff amongst low-cost vector apps, he commented that having more shapes would be a good addition to Lineform. Lineform now has pre-built polygons and star shapes that can be simply dragged into your project.

Plus, Lineform continues to support SVG, PDF and EPS formats and it's easy to apply non-destructive filters to your projects.

The guys at Freeverse were also nice enough to extend a $30-off coupon code to TUAW readers! Enter tuawlineform151 when ordering at Freeverse's site and you can score Lineform 1.5.1 for just $49.95.

$50 for a vector app that is as powerful and easy to use as Lineform is really, really hard to beat. If you want to give it a trial before buying, you can download it free and use it for 30 days. Lineform now requires OS X 10.5 (previous versions did run on Tiger) and it is a Universal Binary. Existing users can install this free update either by using the built-in update check or downloading the DMG from Freeverse.

If you'd like to see your design on a laptop and earn a little extra money to boot, head over to Infectious and check out their Cut to the Core design contest. They are accepting entries for a new run of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptop skins from now until August 4. Each skin is designed around a cut out that'll expose the glowing Apple logo on laptops. Be sure to read the rules carefully (you can't, for example, use the Apple logo in your design) and remember that the contest is voted on by the Infectious community.

The iPhone is designed to work with your fingers, but those stubby appendages aren't the best for doing detailed work. That's why Ten One Design developed the Pogo Stylus (US$14.95), an aluminum stylus with a special tip that allows it to work on the capacitive display of the iPhone and iPod touch. It's also handy for operating your iPhone with gloves on, or for anyone who has trouble working with the touchscreen directly.

Ten One Design is holding an art contest through July 1st, 2009. The rules are simple; you must use a Pogo Stylus to create a work of art on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can use whatever software you desire, although most of the artwork seen below was created with the help of Brushes [App Store]. The winner will have $500 paid to his or her PayPal account.
What are you waiting for? Get your Pogo Stylus and get to work!