Hooray for all us big-window dwelling Mac users! If you're craving something other than Apple's standard glossy screen, the anti-glare matte finish is an option again on the Apple Store for 15" MacBook Pros. Except it'll cost you $50 extra and replaces the black border with a silver one. Small price to pay for reducing eye strain, says I.

[via Engadget]

I ended up going with an iSkin Revo for my iPhone as a thin little protective case, but now that I've seen some of these crazy cases, I'm reconsidering just a little bit. Who wouldn't want to encase your iPhone in what appears to be bacon, or try out the tactile iPhone case above (which transmits button presses to a customized home screen -- not something I'd want to use all the time, but it is wild and it has a purpose).

That Dexter case is cool too, though there are probably plenty of promotional cases out there. It's almost too bad -- when I picked up my plain black case, I was thinking a lot more about function than appearance. There's all kinds of cool things out there to put your iPhone in.

[via Urlesque]

Have you used Mail's stationery and thought that it was too limiting or did not appeal to your tastes? With a simple save button, you can create your own stationery to be exactly the way you want it. Just create a new Mail message, filling in the body as you see fit -- use special formatting, colors, even filler text.

When you have completed your stationery template, click File > Save As Stationery. A dialog box will prompt you to name your new creation. Enter a descriptive title and click "Save." Your new stationery will appear under "Custom" whenever you click the "Show Stationery" button in a new mail message. Clicking your template name will automatically recreate your template in the body of the new message.

This is handy for businesses or individuals who need to have custom formatted emails, and need them to be uniform each time they send them.


Like this tip? Want more? Just visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

Over the past day, Pangea Software has issued two updates for their Enigmo physics game for the iPhone/iPod touch. The updates in question (1.1 and 1.1.1) allow you to download custom levels from Pangea's website via the application.

Be sure to sync your iPhone and complete the backup process before updating Engimo, as the saved game deletion issues continue to be a concern. Pangea has officially acknowledged the issue, and offers backups as a solution. You can download/buy Enigmo from the App Store (iTunes link).

An earlier post about PocketMac Ringtone Studio for iPhone reminded me of how I put together ringtones for my iPhone. I just fire up GarageBand and iTunes, do a little quick magic, and out come the ringtones I want.

This doesn't work with protected files such as those you've purchased from the iTunes Store -- hell, Apple wants you to spend $0.99 for the tune and another $0.99 to turn it into a ringtone. The method described here works very well turning those CD snippets that you've ripped into iTunes into ringtones. Follow along after the break for the step-by-step.

If you think Firefox could run a little faster on your Mac, then you might want to download one of BeatnikPad's custom builds of Firefox 3. "Minefield" (previously known as BonEcho for pre-3.0 releases) is Neil Lee's custom build of Firefox. He is currently offering custom builds for:

• Minefield (Firefox) 3.0 for Intel
  
• Minefield (Firefox) 3.0 for PowerPC G5
• Minefield (Firefox) 3.0 for PowerPC G4

Neil Lee has been offering custom builds of Firefox for many years now. They can make Firefox run a bit faster and smoother on older Macs. You can download them for free (though donations are accepted) from the BeatnikPad website.


[via IGM]

Information Appliance Associates, the company that brought us the PocketMac series of sync software, has announced PocketMac Ringtone Studio for iPhone.

While the $14.95 application doesn't do anything that you can't already do with GarageBand and a little bit of knowledge, it does make creation of custom iPhone ringtones a lot easier. You can drag any unprotected music or QuickTime movie file to PocketMac Ringtone Studio, select a 30-second bit for the ringtone, and then export the ringtone into the iTunes "Ringtones" folder. The video above shows the entire process, along with a strange "jazz and random banging on the piano" soundtrack.

There are some other alternatives available for creating your own ringtones:

• Rogue Amoeba's MakeiPhoneRingtone (free)
• Ambrosia Software's iToner (free to try, $15 to buy)

As usual, the PocketMac folks offer a 90-day "no questions" money back guarantee on their software.

There are two types of Mac users: the mouse-centric, the keyboard jockeys, and those who refuse to sleep with Windows users. OK, three types.

This tip is for users like me whose knowledge of each application's set of keyboard shortcuts is prodigious. Even we get stumped occasionally when a shortcut doesn't work as expected or is simply missing. This is very easily remedied.

In the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, you'll see a little "+". Click it, identify the application you're after and type the name of your target menu item. Next, simply pick a shortcut, click "Add" and you're done! You shortcut is in place and you can avoid another time consuming journey from your home keys to your mouse.

Soon after Steve Jobs announced the new 1.1.3, Emil Hedaya realized that a simple meta-refreseh redirect would allow him to create custom icons for any webclip. All you need is a website of your own. You link to your custom pages and have them redirect you to the sites in question.

To demonstrate this he's put together a set of iPhone shortcuts to his favorite sites (including Meebo, Fandango, Flickr and more). If you navigate to his page and webclip off those links, you'll create some great looking icons on your SpringBoard Home page instead of the dull defaults.

Update: Redirected the links to http://redmedia.com/i/ at Emil's request to avoid overloading his server.

Many folks commented on our recent post about adding those gorgeous drawer icons to your Stacks. As great as the originals are, however, a lot of you also wanted to know how to customize them. Fortunately, the original author was kind enough to make the blank drawer PNG available, so in this little tutorial I'll show you how to make your own customized drawer icons using nothing more than Preview. Obviously you can get much sophisticated results using a more serious image editing application, but Preview can do enough to get you the results you see above and since everyone has it, I thought it best to focus on using it despite its limitations.

If you want to run lots of Apps on your 1.1.1 iPhone or iPod touch but don't want to install SummerBoard, you can download this SpringBoard patcher that provides you with multi-page support.

Copy off Springboard, patch it, put it back onto your device and reboot. It's what I'm running on my iPhone and touch right now and it works beautifully.

Of course, once you have all that space available to work with, what are you going to do with it? I put together a TUAW webpage launcher using the OpenURL kit I posted about a few weeks ago. Now I just tap to launch TUAW.

If you'd like to download your own TUAW launcher, you can grab a copy from the Samples folder in my OpenURL kit. You'll also find instructions there for creating your own website launchers.

Over at website "Jon's Thoughts on Everything", you can find a web-based equivalent of OpenURL. I actually found it harder to use. For me, it involved more work than just adding an icon and editing two lines of text but you might enjoy using it.

Awkward TV has posted this video showing a custom Apple TV plug-in in action. The post mentions that this is the second known custom plug-in (you can see the first in action here), and that it allows you to play .AVI files located on the main disk (rather than the iPod-esque Media library). For now those files are hardcoded in, as this is primarily a proof of concept. They did not provide a link for downloads, and there probably won't be a public release for a while.

ColorwarePC offers a distinct way to create a personalized iPod. They'll color it for you. For $74, they'll tint your iPod from their palette of 28 colors. Pick one color for the click wheel, one for the front housing, one for the back. Some of their colors are flat. Others have embedded metallic flakes that shimmer under bright lights.

Don't have an iPod? They'll sell you a nano or a video model with custom coloring from their in-house stock of new iPods.

Unfortunately, it's already too late to order one of these by Christmas. If you placed an order today, it would arrive early-to-mid January, meaning that you'd have to stick an IOU into someone's stocking.

The coloring service, where you supply the iPod, is US-only. However, new purchases can be made from around the world. Contact the company to see whether they ship to your area.

Mac OS X's built-in spell checking abilities are fantastic, but what if you need to edit the custom list of words you've been building, or you want to nail a few birds with one stone by adding a collection of words in one fell swoop?

Christopher Breen at Macworld has a good tip for just such a case. It turns out that once you begin adding custom words to your dictionary (by right-clicking them in most Cocoa apps and choosing 'Learn Spelling'), a folder aptly named Spelling appears in your Home user folder. In there is a file that I believe is named after your particular language; in my case - English.

Opening this file in something like TextWrangler (or possibly OmniOutliner?) will allow you to edit the dictionary, including adding your own words a little more efficiently. Check out Macworld's tip for the details on how the rest of this works, including a basic method for (sort of) synchronizing your dictionary between Macs.

Are you getting tired of other good icons? Hawk Wings, obsessed with all things Mail.app, has tracked down a Photoshop template for creating your own Mail.app icon. Courtesy of John Godfrey, this Photoshop template contains instructions for inserting your own images into a Mail.app icon, and Tim Gaden also recommends rotating your inserted image to 11.2 degrees counter-clockwise, as well as using an 85 x 90 size to get just the right fit.

But, "how do I turn an image into a Mail.app icon?" you ask. Hawk Wings has a solution for that step too: img2icns is a Universal Binary freeware app that can convert JPEGs, PNGs, TIFs and GIFs to the ICNS format, ripe for using a previous (and simple) TUAW Tip for replacing Mail.app's icon with your much more exciting new creation.