Windows/Mac/Linux: If you’ve been sporting the same desktop wallpaper since the Bush administration, it might be time to mix it up a little. Wally is a lightweight wallpaper changer that pulls images from a wide pool of sources.

For a simple wallpaper refresh, you can simply point Wally at a folder on your computer and set the interval at which you want the wallpaper to refresh. If you don’t have a huge stash of wallpaper, or you’re tired of your collection, you can have Wally pull pictures from remote directories via FTP or from any of ten available sources like Bing, SmugMug, Picasa, Buzznet, Photobucket, Pike, Panoramio, Yahoo!, or Flickr.

You can adjust various settings like auto-rotation based on EXIF data, photo selection only if photos are bigger than the desktop and/or landscape as well as how frequently the wallpaper will change and how pictures will be positioned.

Wally is freeware and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Have a favorite wallpaper tool or source for great wallpapers? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Keep Your Wallpaper Fresh with Cross-Platform Wally [Downloads] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on November 14, 2009.

Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.

Though iPhone’s Safari browser is able to render any website just like you would see it on a desktop browser, the available screen area is much smaller than in common “classic” displays. This poses a new challenge for designers and developers who now can reach millions of users that use mobile Web. Websites that are specifically optimized for the iPhone utilize the screen to the fullest extent, and use less bandwidth (which is necessary, because the connectivity is not always optimal).

The iPhone browsing experience is quite different than the regular browsing experience. The buttons and hyperlinks have to be bigger because our fingers are not as sharp as the mouse pointer. Optimizing a website for iPhone is not rocket science. It’s the same HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you already know. The only major difference is the screen size.

In the showcase below we present some of the interesting, interactive and beautiful designs that are optimized for the iPhone. You will also learn about some handy tools that will help you optimize your website for the iPhone.

Also consider our previous articles:

• How to Create Your First iPhone Application
• iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals
• 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers

1. News / Entertainment

Sevnth Sin
The unique navigation makes this site very interactive. Nice concept, nice colors.

Blip.tv
Perfectly suits the theme: video entertainment! Clean and clear typography.

NBC
The YouTube-style design makes it very easy to navigate and find shows.

Zinio
That’s a kit of magazines, all one-touch away!

Spin The Bottle
A simple bottle spinning game. Good use of graphics.

Daily Wallpaper
Similar to Zinio, but 2 thumbnails in a row make it more easy to navigate around.

AOL Horoscopes
Very well designed for a horoscope site. Matching color scheme throughout.

Yahoo Omg!
Fresh look, vibrant colors and lively typography make this design fun to browse and easy to read. The design also matches the celebrity gossip theme.

2. Business / Corporate

DPTO
Different tones of red make this design look very attractive on the iPhone. The 3D menu looks very nice — perfect for a marketing and design agency.

Mind Medium Creative
The use of gradients make the overall site look very shiny on the iPhone. The menu is very to-the-point. A nice composition and execution.

Redhawk Investment Advisors
This design has a very corporate feel to it. Good use of colors.

Nike Lab
Just what to expect from Nike. Sporty and energetic design.

Procab Studio
Procab studio showcases their work portfolio and other information about the agency. Well placed content. The font size is a bit too small, though.

Hotel Monterilla
The design makes you want to go there for a vacation. The design has a very comforting feel to it. A perfect color scheme.

Viget Labs
A blue background, appropriate padding and rounded corners make this simple design look vibrant and attractive.

Batali Associates
This is one of the good examples of design optimization for the iPhone. It clearly looks like it was really made for the iPhone, not just duplicated.

Ready For iPhone
A company that provides iPhone optimized website solutions. The finger on the “Go” looks intuitive.

Element Fusion
Another showcase website that provides design services. Looks like a cut-down version of the actual website.

Volkswagon
A showcase gallery for Volkswagon. Easy to navigate around. Clean and clear content.

3. Shopping / E-Commerce

Torn Robes
A nice example of a mobile e-Commerce site. Just touch your favourite design, have a look at it and buy it. Looks very vibrant.

Coosh
A single-product e-Commerce site. Branded very well.

Walmart
This design doesn’t really meet the expectations from WalMart — however, the design is still in beta. The usability is good, though: it is very easy to search for products and stores. You can also create shopping lists.

4. Portfolio / Blog

World Ending Blog (Japanese)
Although we did not understand a word there, it is very well designed for the iPhone. Every page is optimized and provides a good browsing experience.

Signal Element
Simple and clean design: just 3 pages, but very well designed.

One Crimson Splash
This is the portfolio of James Finley. The choice of colors and content placement are very good.

5. Education / Content

MIT
What else to expect from MIT? Simple, clean, user-friendly.

101 Cook Books
Not really a fancy design, but it’s the simplicity and clarity of content that makes it appear in this showcase.

Please Fix The iPhone
A good design that provides the desktop browsing experience. It is very easy to find what you are looking for.

1881
The Norwegian telephone directory online. The combination of bright blue, orange and white looks really good.

AOL Food
Heaven for those who love to cook. Just keep your iPhone with you in the kitchen, and let this nice design help you make a delicious dinner.

Deviant Art
A nice way to browse art on the iPhone. The color scheme is good, and it makes the artwork look prominent. Very easy to navigate and search. Also, appropriately sized thumbnails.

Last but not least, some words of wisdom…

Tools to design a website for iPhone

There are some libraries and kits available to help you iPhoneize your design.

• iPhoney
  iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s a perfect tool to see how your web creations will look on iPhone.
• Test iPhone
  A web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone web designs.
• iWebKit (Demo)
  iWebKit is a file package designed to help you create your own iPhone and iPod Touch compatible website or webapp. Comes with various ready-to-use themes.
• iUI
  iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing iPhone web designs. It makes your web designs look and feel like iPhone’s native applications.
• Intersquash (Demo)
  Not really a helpful tool for designing, but you can instantly create an iPhone compatible site from your RSS feed url.
• WPtouch
  For WordPress users: WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch.
• Jaipho Gallery (Demo)
  If your website features a photo gallery, Jaipho will optimize it for iPhone users.

Further Resources

Don’t stop here. Check out these other great tutorials and guidelines.

• iPhone Reference Library
  Apple’s official iPhone reference library for developers. It has everything you need to get started: guidelines, code-examples, tutorials, etc.
• How to build a website for iPhone
  This step-by-step tutorial includes everything you need to do when building a website for iPhone. Instructions for orientation direction also included.
• iPhone Compatible CSS layouts
  Free website layouts which work in all the common web browsers including Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch.
• iPhone Interface Samples
  This includes samples for iPhone interface elements like buttons, fonts, text, design patterns, hacks 6 more.
• iPhoneWebDev Examples
  Very helpful examples for alot of things. Direction change, events, fonts, compression, etc.
• iPhone Application UI Design Patterns
• cssiphone.com
  A showcase of designs optimized for iPhone.

About the author

Adeel Raza is a young entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience on the web. He specializes in user interface, user experience and beautiful design. He loves finding gems out of dirt and showcasing them on his gallery Inspire Mix. Follow him on Twitter to say hi!

© Adeel Raza for Smashing Magazine, 2009. |
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Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on September 27, 2009.

Taking a cue from the custom web search options, Google Images has added fine-grained search controls. Want a pink-hued rabbit image that’s exactly 340×180? A clip art bird larger than 300 pixels wide? Google Image Search has you covered.

As with the newer web search tools, Google Images rolls down the search options in a left-hand sidebar when you click “Show options” in the blue bar right under your search term. Google’s search can recognize clip art, line drawings, photos, and faces in photos, sort pictures by a prevalence of 12 basic colors, and, most helpfully, search photos larger than, smaller than, or exactly a certain pixel size.

It’s easy to imagine desktop wallpaper enthusiasts getting lost inside that kind of custom-fit image search, but it’s also a boon to anyone who’s been stuck looking to fill a white space with just the right size something-or-other. Yahoo Image Search offers the same size-matching, along with Creative Commons licensing filters, but Google’s color-matching and face recognition seem to be unique tools. If there are other image search sites you’ve used that get just as specific as Google’s new roll-out, share the link in the comments.

Ads by Pheedo

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Google Images Offers Search by Size and Face Recognition [Image Search] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on August 4, 2009.

If you have an image, but want to see where on the Web that image is being used, or if you’re a photographer and would like to where on the Web your work may be in use, TinEye is here to help. The service is a search engine for images, and allows you to either upload one or paste the URL of an image already on the Web and the service will search for other sites using it. You can use TinEye to find higher resolution versions of your favorite wallpapers or vanity search for your own graphic design.

Unlike Google Image Search, you don’t start with a phrase with the goal of finding an image at TinEye–it’s the other way around. TinEye lets you start with an image and then find more copies of that image or see where else it’s hosted. Best of all, it’s completely free.

The service has been used by photographers who want to know who else on the Web is using their work–both to see how popular they are and to shut down anyone using it for profit. Others can look for higher resolution versions of their favorite graphics, album art, and wallpapers, or just to find out where their favorite wallpaper originated.

TinEye takes a digital signature of the image you provide and uses that to search the Web for images with a similar signature. This way the service avoids using metadata, tags, or other context on a page where the image is located. Best of all, if you’re a commercial photographer or someone concerned about protecting the images you search for, you’ll be happy to know that any images you upload to TinEye only stay in the site’s database for 72 hours, after which they’re deleted. If you sign up for a TinEye account, you can save images in your profile to make it easy to run searches on them later.

TinEye also offers a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. The bookmarklet allows you to quickly search TinEye for images on a page you’re viewing without having to download the image and re-upload it to TinEye, or copy the image URL and paste it into the search box. If you’re a Firefox or Internet Explorer user, the service also has a plug-in for your browser that extends this functionality and lets you right-click any image and instantly search for it using TinEye.

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TinEye Lets You Search the Web for Images originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 27, 2009.

This Apple Mini Keyboard by philipskillern isn’t just a logical progression of the hardware line, it’s fancy looking too. Download the wallpaper yourself in various sizes. [Deviantart]

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Apple Mini Keyboard Wallpaper [Downloads] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on July 10, 2009.

In this post we release Birdies: A Free Twitter Icon Set, a set of 12 beautiful and lovely Twitter icons. This set was designed by IconEden and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. All the icons included in the set have clean shapes and neutral colors that can be used for various contexts, from a “Tweet it” button for your blogs to desktop wallpapers.

The set is available in both pixel and EPS vector format so the icons can be rescaled to any size while retaining their original details. As usual, the icons are free for both personal and commercial projects.

Download the icon set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

• preview
• download the set (.zip, 1.5 Mb)
• download the .eps-source (.zip, 6.6 Mb, .eps)

Thank you very much, guys! We appreciate your efforts!

Related posts

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

• Flavour Extended Icon Set
• Quartz Icon Set
• Project Icon Set
• DelliStore: A Free Professional CSS/XHTML/PSD-Template
• “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme
• Typography Keyboard Layout

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2009. |
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Birdies: Cute Free Twitter Icons For Your Blog originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on June 24, 2009.

Linux: Mac4Lin, a package of skins, wallpapers, icons, and interface refinements that brings a completist Mac look to Linux with an automated installation, has reached the 1.0 stage with an impressive array of features.

Besides basic theming changes to your desktop covering login windows, window look and feel, a modified app launcher dock, and more, Mac4Lin plugs into and plays nice with a lot of third-party apps. Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, Songbird, Pidgin, Firefox 3, and others are supported and receive theme integrations, while a customized Cairo or AWN dock are rolled into your system during the installation.

It goes without saying, but there are, obviously, areas where the Linux desktop can’t replicate the Mac’s. Still, if you like the Cupertino look for your system, Mac4Lin is an easy way to get there, without an afternoon-consuming step-by-step process.

Mac4Lin 1.0 is a free download for Linux systems. Hit the link below for a list of features, standing bugs, and screenshots.

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Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look [Downloads] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on June 18, 2009.

Would you like to be able to use the magic of Bluetooth to automatically pause iTunes, set your away message in Adium, and lock the screen simply by standing up and walking away from your desk? Of course you would — it’s future-tastic (jetpacks not included)! Let’s take a look at how to pull this off.

What You’ll Need

First you’ll need a copy of Proximity, a handy (and free) little application which monitors your Bluetooth-enabled device and fires off AppleScripts when it leaves and enters connection range. As an added touch, we’ll also use a copy of DeskShade to lock and unlock the computer with style, leaving a nice away message displayed on the screen and opening a “Hacker Log” to display what activity took place while you were away.

DeskShade actually does a lot more than just allow AppleScript to lock and unlock your screen. I won’t go into a full review of it here, but essentially, it will also help keep your desktop clean, your wallpaper fresh, and your mind uncluttered. If, however, you want to forgo the use of DeskShade, you can instead lock and unlock the computer by having AppleScript launch your screensaver and adjust the security settings required for waking it up. AppleScript files for both approaches can be downloaded here (8kb, ZIP).

Getting Set Up

Install Proximity, and from within the preferences pane select your Bluetooth device. I used my iPhone, but any “discoverable” device should work. In the AppleScript section link to OutofRange.scpt for when the device moves out of range and InRange.scpt for when it moves back in range. Make sure that monitoring is enabled and set a frequency for proximity checks — I used 60 seconds. If you decided not to go the DeskShade route, then just swap in the second set of scripts for that step above and skip ahead to the testing.

Install DeskShade and on the DeskLock tab set a password, enable AppleScript to unlock, set the Hacker Log to open after unlocking and set the away message to something appropriate. I used the same “More than 30ft away from my computer” message that is set in Adium via the out-of-range script.

Future Perfect

It’s as simple as that. Get up and take a walk around to test it out; by the time you get back, your computer should be unlocked, and you can have a look at the Hacker Log to see what happened while you were gone. Now all we need are jetpacks, flying cars, and a reliable way to prevent “sock-loss” when doing the laundry, and it will be future perfect.

via theappleblog.com

How-To: Proximity Automation originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on June 11, 2009.