Since we last wrote about them, motionVFX has expanded their selection of high def templates for Apple's Motion significantly. The website is just as easy to navigate as it was before, but there's a lot more content fit for professional video work or great starting points for custom titles, intros and menus.

As a special Holiday treat, motionVFX is offering a coupon code to TUAW readers, good for a 40% discount on all of their Motion templates. : Enter coupon code X9HQVV at checkout to receive your Holiday savings. A big thanks to motionVFX for the generous gift!

iWeb 2 (the iLife '08 version, that is) comes with an assortment of 26 different themes, but if you're tired of trying to mod the Comic Book theme for your new blog, you may want to look at ten new iWeb themes from Jumsoft.

There's a good assortment of styles in the Jumsoft collection. I personally find the Teddy theme to be a bit twee and Flowered World is too feminine for my taste, but YMMV. My personal faves from the new collection are the sparse and paper-like Simple Info, and the pastel and plastic Business. An installer app is included to make sure that your new themes end up in the proper place on your Mac.

Jumsoft sells each theme for $9.99 or you can buy the entire pack of ten themes at a 30% discount for $69.99. If you're an iWeb fan and want some additional design options, take a look at the new themes.

motionVFX, a new source of templates for Apple Motion, is offering 2d and 3d templates prepped at 1920x1080 and 24fps. The 10 second clips are downloadable for $10, so I took one for a spin.

There are rare circumstances when I would use a template for a finished piece, and motionVFX has a relatively small (but growing) starting selection which limits the chances that I'll find anything "perfect" for a current project. However, I love getting inside of other people's work to figure out new ways of doing things and the template I picked was well done, well organized and I did actually learn some new tricks.

The site navigation is mostly intuitive, but lacking in a few features. The previews are quick and helpful, but I miss the "lightbox" functionality found on most stock sites. Maybe they'll get to that as the collection grows. Checkout with Paypal is great for me, but the offsite credit card processing breaks from the overall professional look of the site. The fact that I was quite happy with my purchase made that a moot point for me, though.

motionVFX is offering TUAW lovers a special discount... 25% off of your purchase, including their high-res stock photos, with unlimited use through the end of February. Just enter the coupon code "J2LGR7" at checkout. And because I care about our readers, I tested that too. It works.

Whether you make a living from buying and selling on eBay or you merely sell off your basement junk when it gets too crowded down there, iSale is a fantastic eBay client that merges the wonders of Mac OS X with the world's leading online marketplace. Offering beautiful tempaltes, WYSIWYG auction composing, integration with iCal, Address Book and iSight, a Dashboard widget for monitoring auctions, Google Maps and worlds more, iSale has everything you need to get your eBay on.

Like so many other web-integrated Mac OS X apps, however, iSale was hit with compatibility issues if users installed the Safari 3 beta. Fortunately, a couple of recent updates have fixed those issues and added over 30 new templates to bring the grand total to more than 200 different auction templates, organized by category. With a wide variety of template styles, imagery and layouts, you'll be hard pressed to not find something that'll fit just about anything you post for auction.

This most recent v4.2 of iSale is a free upgrade for registered 4.x users, and a demo is available. A single user license costs $39.95, while family packs start at $49.95 and go up from there.

Despite its baby-app shortcomings, I'm finally beginning to warm up to Pages. It's a very Apple-esque word processor (surprise surprise) with all the power I need without having to deal with the behemoth that is Microsoft Word. That said, I've been finding Pages a bit short on templates lately, and the iWorkCommunity Template Exchange is coming up just isn't doing it for me. Thankfully, I just caught Jumsoft's Pages Templates 1.0, a collection of 20 snazzy lookin' new templates for books, brochures, business cards, invitations, resumes, sales posters, portfolios, catalogs, menus, and even business reports and invoices. Even better, nearly every template offers multiple pages with alternate layouts from the screenshots you see at Jumsoft's site.

Since these are mere templates, it appears Jumsoft doesn't offer any kind of downloadable demo for obvious reasons (I should also note that these templates only work with iWork/Pages '06, not '05). Fortunately, they do include multiple screenshots on the templates that offer more than one layout, so you can at least get a good look at everything the $39 price will get you.

[via MacMinute]

The Finder's Get Info window (View > Get Info or cmd-i) is one of those unsung heroes of Mac OS X computing. It houses a lot of great options, and Stationery Pad is one of them. If you have any kind of workflow where you need to repeatedly modify some sort of a file template, checking this option in any file's Get Info window will tell its parent application to open a copy of it by default, ensuring that the original file remains unedited. While some applications that manage files for you can offer similar functionality, this is a great option for anyone who, for example, use Word docs as contract templates, or begins with a basic pre-built file for various Photoshop or hand-coding CSS/PHP freelance work. You can simply build the file any way you like, save it and check this box in Get Info to tell any app you open it with to open a copy instead of the original.

Easy breezy file templates, with no AppleScripts or plugins required.

A few weeks ago, we pointed to iLifeStuff, a site that creates alternate templates for Apple's iWeb. At the time, they had three templates available and they've since added three more: "Pink," "Light" and "Green." You can buy any individual template for $12.99US, or get all six for $29.99US.

You can also find some great templates (and all-new page layouts) for iWeb at 11 Mystics (I really like this one).

If you're like me (impatient and easily distracted), you've already grown bored with the default iWeb templates. You should visit iLifeStuff. They've got three original iWeb templates for sale, namely, "Water," "Wood" and "Yellow." You can buy any individual template for $12.99US, or get all three for $29.99US.

As for me, I'd love a design that says "kids" without the "cutesy."

[Via MacMinute]