I’ve spent a lot time tweaking a theme of my own. It’s called zerotheme. I did it all on the iTouch itself via a terminal app I’ve installed. I’ve tried using the Customize Web App to build and share it, but after 4 failed attempts (zerolight – zerolightV4) it’s clear that the web-app is currently horribly broken. Any new theme you create ends up as empty folders when shared and downloaded by others – as 28 people told me! Still it works perfectly when built on my iTouch.

It’s got a variation of the dock I use on my iMac, the one I replaced the ugly Leopard one with. It’s got a bunch of icons from David Lanham and Louie Mantia, some nice wallpaper, and a few nice icons I made myself. I also replaced the WiFi indicator with a 5 bar indicator which gives a more accurate indication of the signal strength, and there’s nifty little a blue battery indicator too on the status bar. I made a tweak to the badge, and updated the battery charging screen, then gave it a Stüssy based lock screen… you know I love Stüssy.

edit: If you want it, and since the Customize Web App is f*cked, you can download it for a manual install here.

edit: I’ve migrated it to firmware 2.0 and submitted it to a Cydia repository. In the space of a few hours it’s been downloaded over 1100 times. EEK.

I decided to give it a go yesterday, and whilst I was at it, I mildly tweaked the two themes I liked best Agua (by David Lanham and Louie Mantia) and Buuf2 (by Louie Mantia). The results are below, alongside the original Apple SpringBoard theme. I kinda like it for now. Click the images to enlarge. Photoset here.

Yet beneath all the familiarity, there’s still a lot of great new features. Time Machine is probably it’s crowning achievement, providing a fantastic piece of technology to ensure your data is safely backed up to an external HDD. Most of the new features concentrate on perfecting the user interface and improving your work flow. You can read up on them all here, and check out some screenshots in my flickr set.

DNLA? I’d never heard of that until yesterday. UPnP? Yep, you need that too… shame it clashes with my NAT settings for Xbox360 and PS3 online gaming. So I enabled UPnP on my PS3 and router, then installed and configured TwonkyMedia’s UPnP Media Server on the Mac, because you need some form of DNLA/UPnP Media Server on your PC or Mac to make it work. Finally, I tried to stream media from the Mac to the PS3 – simple stuff like photos, mp3s, the odd movie. Did it work? Nope, but as expected, UPnP fudged up my NAT settings on the Xbox360. And I’m pretty tech-savvy. This is for the masses?

Hopefully Nullriver will update Connect360, to work with the PS3. Should we really have to buy additional software to make these “connected” consoles connect? XBMC, a homebrew application for the old Xbox, is still the best option for streaming content from a PC or Mac to the TV. Is there really anything wrong with plain old Windows or Samba File Sharing?

If you want to run through thousands of photo’s in iPhoto, selecting some for deletion, some for tweaking, and some to be left as is, you quickly find that it’s a slow process in iPhoto (or pretty much any other photo management application). Aperture, from the limited time I’ve had with it, speeds up this process significantly. Tagging files as keepers, rotating images, and so on is a one click process. I think I can probably spend a couple of hrs with Aperture and manage to weed out the dross from my collection. I’ll then export what’s left and import into a fresh iPhoto gallery for general viewing. Whether I’ll bother to clean up images during this process I do not know, but I’d like to think I’ll pass any new images through Aperture before importing them into iPhoto.

The only reason I’d have for not using Aperture as the primary image library is that there’s no simple one click export to Menalto Gallery, a function I already have in iPhoto. Interestingly there is an option to export to flickr. Perhaps I should consider migrating to flickr, a service I’ve never really been keen on? Ian and Roy certainly love it.

Edit:

I’ve found a way around this. Create a new folder at the same level as Applications, ie. at root. I called mine Apps. Like this. Within this new folder, create sub-folders for each category you need (Main, Internet, Rip, Media Players, Music, and so on. I prefix mine with “Apps – “). Like this.

Now place every application into the Applications folder with no sub-folders (except for Utilities). This is the way Apple shipped the Mac. So it’s just a mass of disorganised application files.

Next, create an alias for each application and the Utilities folder, then move those into the newly created Apps folder. Organise these to meet your needs, moving the aliases into appropriate sub-folders. A Better File Renamer will help you remove the word ” alias” from each application alias.

Drag the Applications folder off the Finder side bar and replace it with the new Apps folder. Like this. You’ll need to do this for each user on the Mac. Now you have categorised applications, but System Update still sees a flat applications structure within the Applications folder. You can even make these new folders use the funky Applications folder icon. Finally, for a clean look, hide the alias arrow.

I talked her through connecting and starting it up for the first time and she couldn’t disguise her excitement when, as part of the setup process, the iSight web-cam sparked into life Oh my goodness! I can see my face on the screen!. She’s now up and running with web and email, showing that Apple’s claim’s that even a woman, sorry novice, can be up and running with a Mac in minutes.