Dive into Friday’s snapshot submissions:

• Kevin Davis submits this OS X screenshot sporting Dropshadow’s “Firescape” desktop picture. Audion, overhauled with Ric Zito and Paul Johnson’s F2 face, dishes out tunes along the left edge. Custom icons abound.
  
  
• Derek sends this OS X contribution sporting his Currency Converter utility. iTunes is taking music requests in the upper right.
  
  
• A custom desktop picture and Maury McCown’s AquaX III K-Scheme are showcased in this contribution from J_a_m. iTunes, retro-fitted with an Aqua makeover, is kicking out soundwaves in the upper right.
  
  
• A custom “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” desktop picture and the Aquacid K-Scheme debut in this submission from Adriaan Tijsseling. iTunes is shuffling music tracks in the lower right.

What’s your Mac look like? Send a snapshot for all the Mac world to see.

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Complete Cable Management For The Home & Office.

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Tools of the Trade.by Michael Coyle

George Rubio figured out how to make the dock transparent without having the single pixel of white. While he will carry the secret to his grave, you can download the updated pdf files! :)

Updated: Add SoundJam's Applescript Dictionary to Classic iTunes.

Rather than copy the resources from SoundJam to make iTunes scriptable, Doug Adams says the commands were always there, you just have to access them another way until a dictionary is complete:

tell application "iTunes"
«event hookPlay» -- Play
«event hookPaus» -- Pause
«event hookStop» -- Stop
«event hookNext» -- Next track
«event hookPrev» -- Previous track
«event aevtejct» -- Eject CD
end tell

Doug knows his Applescripts. He runs two sites: Applescripts for Tex-Edit Plus and Applescripts for SoundJam.

If you drive a VW Bug and have a Dalmatian iMac, do I have an iTunes plugin for you! Take a look at Dave Goeb's FlowerPowerFlow plugin.

User Contributed Splash Screens: by Michael Coyle

• Belinda sends another of her great looking Interarchy Interfaces! This one is titled, "stoneHenge Mystic".
  
  
• Backing away from the Aqua palette, George Krueger sends this iTunes skin titled "Forest" in subtle shades of green.
  
  
• Tom Purtell created an About this Mac replacement called "lunar".
  
  
  

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Snapshots by Jeremy Hoesly

Icon & Desktop News: by Dan

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

• 'Nicolas Cardot continues to create more of his fantastic icon sets for the Mac Community. "Fablue icons 08" is the second of 3 brand new sets to be featured on Resx. Download this cool set of 15 graphite numbered keypad button icons right here or from his website.
  
  
• George Sturges rolls the stunning beauty of Angelina Jolie (Tomb Raider) and the dark intrigue from "Hackers" into a very cool desktop picture. This one comes in 1024x resolution and is well worth the download.
  
  
• James S. Zakany was poking around with the FREE Strata3D and figured out how to raytrace primitives and show a floor. He cleaned up the resulting rendered image two ways with the EXPENSIVE Photoshop. "Primitive 2" is a somewhat de rigeur glob-above-tile-floor with a couple twists. The tile floor is translucent. The globs are not spheres. Some extensive lighting effects were added via Photoshop and comes in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• Rodrigo de O. Grecchi submits a "Super" Think Different desktop in 1152x resolution.
  
  
• "Tree Growing in Water" is another lovely photographic desktop from Jeremy Hoesly, our resident Snapshot Department manager. Part of a number of Nag's Head shots to be found at Jeremy's website Hoeslyvista, this backdrop comes in 1024x resolution
  
  
• Paul Sahner of DV Graphics displays an apocalyptic vision with "Bad things vortex" desktop. "Being sucked into a horrible oblivion where there's bound to be bad things is a frightening thought" he writes. See it for yourself in 1024x resolution.
  
  
• Bradford J. Wiles so very artfully creates an "Ice Mountain", another of his awesome 3-D/ Bryce rendered desktop creations to add to your collection in 800x and 1024x resolution.
  

News From Around the Web:

Hoeslyvista has been updated with 5 new desktops.

Dean's Designs has updated with 2 new desktops.

There are three new desktops posted on 6/25 at http://www.bish73.com.

Well, it's finally here. Macuserx.com, well not totally finished but it will be completed by July4th.

Mandolux wanted to let you know that there are 20 new desktops at http://www.mandolux.com - again, these are a continuation of this wonderful series about the Impressionist Movement.

Another series of desktop pictures based on digital photos of interesting textures has just been posted to Gridface. Neighborhood Desktops features six new photos in a variety of sizes from 640 x 480 to 1280 x 960.

Jon wanted to tell you that he has some really cool new iMac icons at his website.

Wes is working on his new website - Skull Island Arts - "The Asylum for the Creatively Insane". He plans to have a desktop pic section with some mac oriented stuff and thought you might like an early preview.

Dome-O-Rama updates featuring a Figural Miss Liberty, this is the first of hopefully a year's worth of dome pinup calendar using both dome picture, DOR style art and DOR backgrounds - this month it's Boomerang Bold in Vermillion. A hot color for a hot month.

Clockadial has a new selection of Browser Startup splash screens.

Mike Davidson's Mac File Library has been updated cool flash screen saver (white apple logo spinning on black background) and a cool transparent desktop (A perfect replica of the Genius Bar logo).

Creative Box has updated with a new desktop picture named "Rip. Mix. Burn.

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

REALbasic News by Erick Tejkowski

This week in REALbasic news:

• Secret new function revealed
• Secure Sockets
• Game Console 1.0
• And, functionality for the "poor man"...

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

Click here to learn more about Toast 6 Titanium

Today's News by Cletus™

The winners have been chosen by Toren for the I/OS X Special Edition Giveaway Contest. The names are listed below. To see the winners entire contest entry go to the contest page! Pretty interesting. Once again, ResExcellence and Toren Valimir would like to thank all those that participated in this contest. Congratulations to the three winners.

Brian Carstensen, who wrote:
"I should be given a free registration because I just met the single cutest girl in the entire..."

Scott Boettcher:
Because when I show off my Macs at meetings (TiG4 using Airport) I love to load great-looking schemes and watch the PeeCee guys..."

Beverly Woods:
"I am quite intrigued by your contest, and even more intrigued by the snapshot of your work that was on the ResExcellence site. I think your themes..."

Prefling 1.2.2 is the latest release of this Dockling by Amar Sagoo for accessing system preferences directly. This version fixes a warning one would get after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.0.4.

MacDICT 2.0 provides easy access to many databases including Webster's Dictionary. I use this program all the time. Changes in this update are:

• Removed the Search feature because of copyright concerns, I might replace it with a plug-in system in the future
  
• Removed and/or rewrote a lot of outdated code
  
• MacDICT now supports UTF-8, as required by the DICT RFC
  
• MacDICT now supports authentication
  
• BabelFish works again
  
• Added an alternate view for definitions ("Don't Organize Results")
  
• Added a Welcome window that briefly describes all of MacDICT's features
  
• Expanded font customization options
  
• Various interface changes
  

ScreenShot Pro Carbon 1.5 is available for download and provides compatibility for Mac OS X. "This powerful alternative to "Grab" is designed for busy graphics professionals and makes it easy and fast to take screen shots for quick soft proofing. ScreenShot Pro first captures a portion of the screen, then quickly saves your screen shot in any of numerous graphics file formats including Adobe Photoshop, JPEG and TIFF." Updates to this version are listed below.

• First release of ScreenShot Pro for OS X. This "Carbon" version is not intended for use with System 9.x or previous "Classic" OS.
  
  
• Added scale menu to Preview Window allowing you to scale image on-the-fly.
  
  
• New Serial Number format. Registered users of SSP 1.0 or 1.1 are entitled to receive a free updated serial number. Please visit "Product Info" page.
  

Good bit of news. After updating Mac OS X to 10.0.4 I am now able to plug and unplug my USB Zip drive on the fly. Unfortunately I still am unable to print to my USB 695C HP DeskJet.

Scheme News:

The Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive has a nice update once again as they load 10 new and 10 updated scheme for your viewing pleasure. New schemes include several previously mentioned at ResExcellence as well as several schemes not mentioned here before. It makes the trip to the archive worthwhile! Several unique schemes include those by Steven Johns: Almost Nothing and Fine-Point Black.

Aquacid 1.0.5 is the latest update to this Kaleidoscope Scheme put out by the Aquacid Project and available at Desktopper dot net!

Submit Software and General News Suggestions!

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Polling Place.by Michael Coyle

While I was not surprised that most readers have stereo audio in their TV, the 33% with surround sound was a shock!

13% of the televisions with mono sound may not seem like much, but it will be a large enough group to keep my commercial audio mixes mono-compatible. One in ten listeners cannot be ignored.

To the 8% without any television I must ask, how do you get by with Star Trek reruns?

There are a surprising number of choices if you want to use a carbon/cocoa web browser under MacOS X. This week's Polling Place asks which one is your favorite. Please don't email me to say I forgot to list a classic browser. I'm only concerned with readers who have run a native application in MacOS X.

Tools of the Trade.by Michael Coyle

Melissa has added 8 new sites to the ResExcellence Links page.

Every company makes mistakes, and Apple is no exception. AppleBlunders is a humorous site that tracks these corporate gaffes.

After seeing my keyboard featuring new caps keyBORG replacement keys from DigitalHipps, Trevor sent a picture of his. The white keys are from an old iBook keyboard he had laying around. Anyone know a parts dealer who will sell only an iBook keyboard?

Add SoundJam's Applescript Dictionary to Classic iTunes.

One nice feature from the free version of SoundJam was its ability to accept Applescript commands, a feature missing in the classic version of iTunes 1.1.

Assign the following simple script to a Function key in the Keyboard Control Panel, and SoundJam would skip to the next song - without having to be the font application!

tell application "SoundJam"
next track
end tell

Since many of the same developers from SoundJam also wrote iTunes, could the Applescript resources from SoundJam be grafted onto iTunes? The answer is "Yes". (Continued...)

User Contributed Splash Screens: by Michael Coyle

• David Messick sent a great looking Dragon MOSS contribution that includes lots of goodies: some icons, a MOSS how-to, and a Red Dragon Tattoo. (I tried using the tattoo, but no matter how much I licked my LCD screen, I couldn't get it to transfer to my arm.)
  
  
• Our own snapshot editor, Jeremy Hoesly, sends another About this Mac creation based on his photos. This one is titled, "Boat on Shore".
  
  
• Jayson Allyson created a sunburst splash for Internet Explorer.
  
  
• Here is the first of two cool Interarchy Interfaces created by Belinda.
  
  

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Snapshots by Jeremy Hoesly

Let’s kick off the week with another round of snapshots:

• The “Bubbles in Bubbles” desktop picture from our Desktop Archive debuts in this snapshot from Jade Barton. SoundJam, equipped with the Sony MiniAmp skin and WhiteCap visualizer, is kicking out tunes along the left edge. A smattering of icons from ResExcellence, Icon Factory, Xicons and icons.cx are also showcased.
  
  
• Ben Mackin is handing his homework in early with this OS X screenshot sporting a “Think Different” desktop picture as assigned by Cletus on Friday. One shiny gold star for Ben!
  
  
• Tim Mityok contributes this OS X submission featuring a recolorized version of the “Quantum Foam” desktop picture. iTunes is shuffling music in the lower right. Calvin & Hobbes icons from Xicons are scattered throughout.
  
  
• This OS X contribution from Andy Moraitis sports RAILhead Design’s “Graphite Stripes” desktop picture. Selections from icons.cx’s Spiffy Apps collection are also present.

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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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