Top the week off with a fresh batch of snapshots:

• It’s time for another blast to the past in this snapshot taken by Emer of an old PowerBook 100. Sometimes seeing where we’d been helps us better see how far we’ve come.
  
  
• Peter McHugh returns with another submission bearing a desktop picture from his “Arachnophobia” collection combined with CRasH’s Atlantis Theme. Very blue.
  
  
• This OS X submission from Jeff Porter touts Mac Desktops’ “Cuillins” desktop picture. Mozilla, an open-source version of Netscape’s Communicator, is cruising the Internet.
  
  
• A custom “Dracula” desktop picture and Michael Rabe’s Ruby Fire Theme are showcased in this contribution from Richard Rice. A few custom icons also lurk about the desktop.

Have a desktop masterpiece you’d like to share with the Mac masses? Read our submission guidelines and then bring it on!

Complete Cable Management For The Home & Office.

I have been doing a little tiding up around the old website. The Terminal section was merged with a reworked MacOS X section that matches the layout of the Previous Edits page. The menu bar now has a link for Classic ResEdit Mods and MacOS X Mods.

If you keep a sharp eye on the ResExcellence Snapshots, you may have noticed some of the MacOS X desktops have transparent Dock backgrounds. How do you do that?

Using Photoshop, create a new image one pixel by one pixel and set the contents to "transparent". Unfortunately, you can't save a transparent image as a pdf in Photoshop, so I tricked it by selecting the PDF Print Driver in the Chooser, and printed the tiny image to pdf. Under Page Setup, be sure to turn off any pdf image compression that will make the image milky instead of transparent.

Take the saved pdf file, make two copies, and rename them left.pdf, middle.pdf, and right.pdf. Follow the instructions on this previous edit to place the new files in the correct folder. What? You're too lazy to go through the trouble? Fine. Download mine.

Shadow

Paul Marcos is a MacOS X software engineer at Apple, and it's a picture of his dog, Shadow, a six year old Golden Retriever. In previous versions of Mail.app his picture would show up whenever people received an email from Paul, but in one of developer releases this got broken. (I wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that the Happy Mac image is a picture of Steve Jobs' dog. - MC)

Fontosaurus Text has posted three new free fonts -- Neuronal Rust, Nitroglycerin, and Depleted Uranium Humanist, in addition to the new Font of the Month, Depleted Uranium. There is also a new set of Mac OS X icons, for you elitist types.

User Contributed Splash Screens: by Michael Coyle

• Anthony Wu has updated his nice set of splash screens for Microsoft Office.
  
  
• She's at it again! Mandy Gordon has sent another "Hunk" MOSS. This one features Richard Dean Anderson, better known as MacGuyver.
  
  

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Snapshots by Jeremy Hoesly

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Icon & Desktop News: by Dan

Icons - Desktops: We've got (6) fine desktops and a (2) part OSX Icon set to dress up your desktop. All on display for today's update!

• "Pratches Files" for OSX icons were created to look as much like real folders as possible. Although there are smaller OS9 versions included, these icons are meant to be for OS X. Today's download includes the aqua and graphite versions of 17 different folders.
  
  
• Even though you can't use desktop patterns anymore with OSX, those running OS 8 and earlier will appreciate this little goodie. The "desktop pattern collection" includes 68 different patterns collected from all the previous OS releases in scrapbook format.
  
  
• "Bellybutton window" created by Gigi is a really interesting and colorful desktop you might enjoy. Comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• Tomb Raiders fans will enjoy "Until the Tomb" desktop submitted by Juan Santiago. Featuring the ultra sexy Angeline Jolie as Laura Croft, this one comes in 1280x resolution.
  
  
• James S. Zakany was poking around with the FREE Strata3D and figured out how to raytrace primitives and show a floor. Cleaned up the resulting rendered image two ways with the EXPENSIVE Photoshop. "Primitive" is a muted desktop with a classic dock “L” and color coordinated off-edge strip in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• "Bubbles in Bubbles" submitted by Bruce Hulvey has become an office favorite in his neck of the woods. This cool 3-D desktop created in Infini-D comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• You've been up half the night; your eyes have become so blurry that you begin to see "GreEN jUnk" on your computer screen; you tried your darndest to organize those images into a sensible scene. You've got a bad case of too much "caffeine." This nicely done 3-D rendered desktop by Bradford J. Wiles comes in 1024x and 800x resolution.
  

News From Around the Web:

Creative Box has updated with a new desktop picture named "Notorious Teef"

DV Graphics has posted 2 new OS X icon sets and will be posting a bunch of new desktops in the next few days.

Mac Axonz just released the brother to popular dp blobz called Cybez.

Mike Davidson's Mac File Library has been updated with a spinning white apple flash based screen saver and the Genius Bar transparent desktop.

Tray's Trove updates June 17, 2001 with eight new desktop designs.

Dornbyg.com has updated his site. He has added 5 sets of icons for both OSs and a few desktop pics. There is some other things there as well.

Check out www.tk2.speed.co.jp/ryo-saka/Cactus_Studio/ for some extraordinary icons!

There are 10 new desktops at Mandolux. These desktops are there are about the Airbus A340 jetliner in letterbox format.

Colheres updates with a new icon set called and a new desktop picture.

Hoeslyvista has been updated with four new pictures taken at Nags Head, NC.

DV Graphics has updated it's desktop section. It's gone through a total revamp. It also features a brand new set of desktops.

Gridface, the e-zine dedicated to digital art, techno music, and poetry, is proud as punch to announce a new set of desktop pictures.

Bish73.com (Josh Bishop) updates with 3 new desktops.

So what's up WWW? Icons? Desktop pictures? News? Inform us! We'll post it!

REALbasic News by Erick Tejkowski

This week's REALbasic news highlights:

• Euros, Euros, everywhere
• Why 13 isn't always bad luck
• Automate your REALbasic builds
• And, dead ducks...

Find this and more in today's REALbasic News. (Continued...)

GlassBox - in the Archive now!

eMails have been pouring in asking "When is GlassBox being released?"

Guess what? :-)

Today with GlassBox, the evolution of the glass themes has reached a new high. This theme is my personal favorite and has a nice clean look without being too simplistic. It has been added to the Theme Archive today for you to download.

Talking about glass themes. Don't forget to stop by next week. For the release of the "X theme" Glass.

See ya on the flip flop!

If you have a theme you wish to add to the Archive, drop me an email.

Complete Cable Management For The Home & Office.

Today's News by Cletus™

Check back Wednesday for the winners of the Aladdin Giveaway. They will be hard at work evaluating all of the entries on Monday.

Let's have another giveaway! Toren Valimir is offering three registrations for his I/OS X Special Edition Kaleidoscope Scheme package! These are some of my favorite schemes. You can tell by looking at them that there has been a lot of work that has gone into the small details. The package includes not one, not two, but 5 Kaleidoscope Schemes and all that come with it. Including free updates to future schemes. Stop over to the contest page and read the guidelines.

Fabien Octave has released BeHierarchic 4.2. If you have been using the latest beta version, you can update now. Behierarchic is without doubt the best Apple Menu enhancement around. There has never been a system version I have run without using this program and quite frankly there never will be. This version hosts many changes which can be found here. One important feature with this release is that it is now compatibility with the classic environment under Mac OS X.

Dock-It 0.2 is now available. We mentioned this finder enhancement utility for the Mac OS X operating system last week. Dock-It adds a drive/favorites bar dock and an optional shelf for file operations. Changes from the initial release include:

• Shelf location now updates as the location preference is changed
  
  
• Added Bottom Left, Bottom Center and Bottom Right as possible locations
  
  
• Fixed bug where shelf item spaces where remembering labels after an item was removed
  
  
• You can now hide the Drive/Favorites dock
  
  
• Added preference to not show drives in Drive/Favorites dock
  
  
• Deactivated pretty much all console messages
  
  
• You can now set the size of the dock tiles
  
  
• Reorganized Preferences Panel
  

Themes.org continues to be down for the moment due to some mischief. The main homepage has the details. If you are interested in downloading any themes however you can still do so from their mirror FTP site.

David Lloyd posted MultiAlias 1.3 last week, which is an update to this program. Mentioned previously here, MultiAlias 1.3 acts like a normal alias in the Finder, with one exception— it can contain multiple alias that will open or launch those items when double clicked.

Applelust has a special page with a downloadable PDF for keeping track of your switch to Mac OS X and the resultant cost factors in order to be eventually "Classic Free." If your goal is to be running totally in Mac OS X within the next year or so, it will require both your required programs be ported to Mac OS X as well as possibly purchased again. In some cases the change over may free. In almost all cases however, it is going to be a pricey change over for the user.

Scheme News:

Titanium 7 1.1 is an update by Daisuke listed at Desktopper for this Kaleidoscope Scheme.

Something Blue 1.0 is a new Kaleidoscope Scheme available at Interface Central. A preview is available here.

Submit Software and General News Suggestions!

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Polling Place.by Michael Coyle

Last week's poll was almost evenly split into thirds between twin blades, triple blades, and electric razors. Given the recent introduction of triple blades, I was surprised at their strong showing. This question was prompted by my difficulty finding "Track II" blades. I guess it may be time for me to move up to the triples! What about the Other 1%? I imagine it's waxing! (Ouch!)

Just as Superman has Clark Kent, I too have an alter-ego. During the day, I am a mild mannered recording engineer in Metropolis. While mixing TV commercials, I constantly have to take into account the difference between a stereo and mono mix. (If a stereo mix is played on a mono TV, any sound panned to only one side will be perceived as very low in volume.)

In order to determine how much value to place on the mono mix, this week's Polling Place will ask you, "What kind of audio does your TV have?"

Tools of the Trade.by Michael Coyle

Many multi-lingual readers, more literal than me, wrote to that this:, means "Updated Everyday!", and that's exactly what ResExcellence is!

Rene from Happicon sends this handy tip for MacOS X to move or copy a file or folder while staying in one Finder window. Drag the icon of the destination folder up into the Finder toolbar. Then navigate to the source folder and drag the items to be copied up onto the destination icon in the toolbar. In effect, you are using the toolbar as a 'holding area'. After you are done you can drag the folder from the toolbar to delete it.

Douglas Polk from Macalicious.net has way too much free time on his hands:

I've got a something silly for you inside the Mail.app package's resource folder, there's a pmarcos.tiff file -- a picture of someone's dog. I'm not up on breeds, though it looks like a Labrador retriever. At any rate, have you had anyone mention this little Easter egg to you? And more importantly, has anyone managed to figure out how to (or if it's possible), invoke it from the application. I've tried every key combo I could think of, and even tried addressing a message to pmarcos@mac.com, to see if the pic would appear in the message window (one off Mail's little features I love), but no dice.

Any ideas? Do you know this dog?

The other day, I mentioned the Terraserver as a site to view detailed satellite images of the US. Bobby Thompson recommends MapQuest instead. The images are in color, and you can search for a specific address.

User Contributed Splash Screens: by Michael Coyle

• A funny About this Mac replacement was created by Chad Wolcott featuring a scene from the movie "Fight Club".
  
  
• Darwin created a makeover for ICQ that does the following:

1. Got rid of the flowers, but kept the status icons.
2. Changed all the garish colors to grayscale
3. different typeface for the ICQ logo at the top.

• The new Planet of the Apes is due out soon, and Rodrigo de O. Grecchi created an Explorer splash from a scene of the movie.
  
  
• Do you have an original G3 tower (the bondi ones)? Rainer Ziller whipped up a MacOS X Login and Boot panel featuring that machine.
  
  
  

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Calendar & Appointment Scheduler for Mac OS X

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Snapshots by Jeremy Hoesly

Monday’s snapshot lineup is rearing to go:

• Mac Axonz’s “Blue-Blobz” desktop picture and the Unlined Charcoal Theme are showcased in this OS X snapshot from Richard Claridge. Selections from Xicons roam the desktop.
  
  
• A custom desktop picture of Audi’s 2002 A4 Avant is featured in this OS X contribution from Toyin Fayemi along with the Iridium Theme. OmniWeb is surfing the web at left center.
  
  
• ID-Room’s “Aqua-opening” desktop picture and the custom Black Charcoal Theme debut in this submission from Orsini. iTunes, outfitted with a custom skin, is on standby along the bottom edge. Icons from Xicons are also on display.
  
  
• Jim Whitehurst submits this cool OS X screenshot touting Chris Kiss’ “TiBook Spiderman” desktop picture. iTunes is kicking out soundwaves in the lower right, and Icon Factory’s Titanium Folders are situated along the right edge.

Have a desktop masterpiece you’d like to share with the Mac masses? Read our submission guidelines and then bring it on!

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Click here to learn more about Toast 6 Titanium

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Icon & Desktop News: by Dan

Icons - Desktops: We've got (6) fine desktops and (1) OSX Icon set to dress up your desktop. All on display for today's update!

• Pratche's "Bungie Icons" for OSX includes 5 versions of the marathon logo, the 7 steps to world domination, Ling-Ling's Head, a composite of Ling-Ling's head and the 7 steps (a 'la limited edition T-shirt which he won at MWNY 00 =), and of course, the Bungie Logo.
  
  
• 'DragonTongue has been burning the midnight oil in a creative frenzy, and emerges long enough to submit "Them Shiny Apples" to the Archives. This elegant desktop was designed to compliment his "Steelskin" v1.0.2 Kaleidoscope scheme. If your like this backdrop, visit the website where you will find a page full of desktops for that scheme. This one comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• Modern art comes to your desktop with "Cubist Sunrise" by Gigi. This cheerful pastel backdrop comes in 1024x and 800x resolutions.
  
  
• I admit Henry Stidston's "Christmas Scene" is a bit out of place for a hot summer night, but unfortunately this is the last desktop I have on hand from Henry's large collection of 3-D rendered creations, and just won't wait till December to get shown off. This cooling winter scene comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• "Raining Napalm" by Soren Laulainen is a visually interesting but slightly unsettling desktop which comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• George Rubio submits a nifty desktop picture he designed titled "Almost Audi". This simple but cool 3-D rendered backdrop comes in a whopping 1600x resolution.
  
  
• "Goupe" by Bradford J. Wiles reminds me of... Eewww!!! Let your imagination answer that question in 1024x or 800x resolution.
  

News From Around the Web:

Tray's Trove updates June 17, 2001 with eight new desktop designs.

Dornbyg.com has updated his site. He has added 5 sets of icons for both OSs and a few desktop pics. There is some other things there as well.

Check out www.tk2.speed.co.jp/ryo-saka/Cactus_Studio/ for some extraordinary icons!

There are 10 new desktops at Mandolux. These desktops are there are about the Airbus A340 jetliner in letterbox format.

Colheres updates with a new icon set called and a new desktop picture.

Mac.axonz.com has a new icon set called Metalz. Metalic-ish looking iconz viewed from an angled perspective. 26 Iconz in the set.

Hoeslyvista has been updated with four new pictures taken at Nags Head, NC.

DV Graphics has updated it's desktop section. It's gone through a total revamp. It also features a brand new set of desktops.

Gridface, the e-zine dedicated to digital art, techno music, and poetry, is proud as punch to announce a new set of desktop pictures.

Bish73.com (Josh Bishop) updates with 3 new desktops.

Mike Davidson's Mac File Library has been updated with a slightly improved interface, a tutorial section, and an open call for submissions.

Steve Sobek updates with 5 new desktops.

So what's up WWW? Icons? Desktop pictures? News? Inform us! We'll post it!

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Click here to learn more about Toast 6 Titanium

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Previous News Page...

You can now upload your contributions (include a READ ME) to the ResExcellence
ftp drop box, and let us know with an email. Be sure to read the Submission Policy