Have you noticed that screenshoots you make with the key command Apple-Shift-3 or Apple-Shift-4 are somewhat blurry and not pixel perfect? That is because by default the screen-shoot format is a made as a jpeg set to resolution 60. That's pretty low and therefore it produces small file sizes which is good for most uses, but not if you want to see every pixel in detail.

To fix this issue you have to set the deafult screenshoot format to png, pdf or tiff. You can do that with Terminal. Type these commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer

Press return after each line and replace png with pdf or tiff as you wish. Notice how sharp is the screenshoot above. ;)

I was looking for a good way to implement a simple theme switcher for creativebits' light theme and found this competition on smashing magazine. The winner has a very sexy OS X style box that moves around and allows switching between several themes. I think it's an overkill for our purposes, but it is certainly inspiring.

As long as we're on the topic of Leopard.

Has anyone had experience recovering from a crash with Time Machine.

And I'm just fishing here, but has ANYBODY had experience with Time Machine that worked across a network over multiple machines? i.e If you have multiple macs running Time Machine how would it work exactly?

They would like to buy an xserve for our department and keep saying Time Machine would solve our back up problems. Any thoughts?

In a moment of boredom today, I started fiddling around with my "Spaces" preference in Leopard. I'm starting to think it's kind of groovy... instead of collapsing windows down into my dock, I just hide them entirely by switching to separate working spaces.

I organized it by putting all my design apps in one working space (all my Creative Suite apps), my word processing apps in a different working space (ie: Word, Xcel, etc.), and my various Apple apps in a different one (ie: iCal, Safari, etc.).

Do any of you use Spaces, and if so, how do you utilize/organize and do you feel they're worthwhile?

Looks very exciting. More info here.

The new Coca-Cola visual identity system designed by Turner Duckworth, London & San Francisco took home the very first Design Grand Prix at Cannes, France today. Over the years Coke's visual identity had become cluttered and uninspiring, diluting the brand's iconic status. The design studio clarified the identity, then injected a little fun into everything from cups to trucks.

I work a lot on Coca-Cola branding and I welcome this change with open arms. I always thought simplicity will be refreshing for Coke. This new identity gives opportunity for creativity while leaves the overall look clean and simple.

How do you get your daily update on the hottest stories of the day? You can get a quick overview of your favorite feeds with an RSS reader, but what about the stories that are hot, but do not fall into your blogosphere? Are you going to check out Digg, reddit, delicious and hackernews? That's way too much effort and time. How about a quick overlook of all four? That's what Our Signal is all about.

OurSignal.com looks at currently popular items on the top social news sites and mashes it all together. The idea is to allow users (you especially) to get a rapid overview of what the latest breaking headlines are at the frontline of the intermatubes. The bigger the box, the more relative votes a story has. The warmer the color, the quicker the story is on the rise. Cooler colors denote negative velocity. Sources are refreshed every 15 minutes.

I have 5 special promo codes that allows you to get these free offers:
* You will get four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth!
* If you choose our five-year plan, you'll get $150 off!
* If you choose our ten-year plan, you'll get $200 off!

Comment and I'll send you the code in email to be used when you sign-up.

If you only want to sign-up for one year, this popular Dreamhost promo code is still valid (157 people used it so far).

In honor of Father's Day, XtraLean Software is offering a special deal for Mac enthusiasts. Buy Shutterbug at the discounted rate of $29.95 (normally $39.95) and receive ImageWell (normally $19.95) absolutely FREE!

Just use the coupon code MACDAD08 when you make your purchase before June 15th through the XtraLean Father's Day store.

ImageWell allows you to Edit and Send your pictures, screenshots and other files to anyone, anywhere with one simple click of a button! Batch process your images, layer multiple images, label your screenshots, add drop shadows, shapes and borders, save your favorite styles, and much more. Download a demo here.

Shutterbug allows you to get a site up in a hurry. Satisfy the hunger and do more with your website - photo albums, movies, journals, image rollovers, contact forms and a selection of more than 80 fully customizable free themes. Create a simple online gallery or go all the way with a full featured website. Try ShutterBug and experience the control and freedom everyone is talking about. Shutterbug is a template-based Web editor that also allows you FULL WYSIWYG control. Download a demo here.

I can personally vouch for both products. I know the developers quite well and they're very responsive to questions & suggestions. I have used both of these great products for years and they couldn't be easier.

Anything missing you've been hoping for?

Google just introduced Gmail Labs — 13 new optional features that you can try out on your Gmail account. To get them go to your settings and click the Labs button. Let's check the new features out.

read more

If you're seeing this post you're seeing the site on the new server, an Intel Xeon E5335 2GHz 4-core CPU running on 64bit Linux with 4GB RAM and RAID disks. It's supposed to be really fast. The front page loads in an average of 212ms instead of 1700+ms on the old one running on Dreamhost.

We also upgraded the engine to Drupal 5.7, which forced us to completely rewrite the theme from xtemplate to phptemplate. That's why you were seeing some bugs in the last week. I apologize.

All these changes were possible thanks to JM and Khalid. These infrastructural improvements are paving the way to a new creativebits. If you have a suggestion or comment on what would you like to be changed or improved please chime in.

Check out these free stencils for your design work. Very useful if you are designing an application.

In case you haven't seen the press release yet.

Adobe Systems on Monday announced a major upgrade to its Acrobat software for creating and sharing documents. Adobe Acrobat 9 includes native support for Flash and other rich media plus new features for collaboration and sharing. Concurrent with the new software, Adobe has launched Acrobat.com, a Web site offering a suite of hosted services centered around the software.

If you have two or more Macs (and/or Windows boxes) and want to synchronize a folders and files between them seamlessly, plus have them all backed up online automatically try Dropbox. Watch the video to find out more details.

The service is by invitation only at the moment, but as always (gmail, joost, etc) I'm giving out invites to our members. I only have 10 at the moment, so the authors of the first 10 comments will receive it. If I get more I'll send them as well. Enjoy!

Firefox is about make history again. To help them all you have to do is download Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours. Do your pledge now!

FF has already overtaken IE in many countries and many site's stats show high Firefox usage. Here are creativebits.org's numbers: Firefox 45.66%, IE 33.78%, Safari 17.44%, Opera 2.06%.

Firefox is about make history again. To help them all you have to do is download Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours. Do your pledge now!

FF has already overtaken IE in many countries and many site's stats show high Firefox usage. Here are creativebits.org's numbers: Firefox 45.66%, IE 33.78%, Safari 17.44%, Opera 2.06%.

As much as the 7.0 revision of QuarkXPress was about complex, inter-related publishing workflows, the new version announced today is about a much-needed new look and a host of tools aimed squarely at graphic designers. Quark wasn’t necessarily wrong to focus on the hard-core production market in the last couple of versions, but neither were designers wrong to conclude the XPress interface was looking a little behind the times.

The success the Adobe Internet juggernaut hath wrought is testament that common interface design, predictable tool sets, and cross-application support is just as important as how well an application fits in to the daily demands of a production-heavy environment (where XPress has remained strong). And that publishing production is now a global business challenge needing a single-software solution, not a bunch of market-priced versions to support multi-lingual output.

So in some ways XPress 8 is an admission by Quark that Adobe is now setting the standards for how designers work. XPress 8 is much more “Creative-Suite like” in how it looks and works. But I’m glad to say Quark didn’t just copy a few interface ideas or settle on some standard keyboard shortcuts. By going back and re-focusing on the little stuff, they’ve actually made some giant strides forward.

Click the link to read the full article on creativepro.com

First of all don't be fooled by SEO professionals. 95% of the offers are scam. The rest are serious professionals, but unless you are running a million dollar business you don't need them. Just follow these 5 suggestions and you can be sure you've done everything you can to rank high in Google.

1. Include the keywords in your domain name, page title and h1 article title. So for example if you want to sell squirrel food, register the domain squirrelfoodforsale.com. Include the keywords Squirrel Food in the page title and h1 article title. Include the same keywords in the body copy as well, but don't overdo it. Just make it natural.
2. Make sure as many related sites link you as possible. Not only the link has to include your keywords but the title of the article linking you should include it too. So if petfood.com links your site from the article Feeding your squirrel then you've got a valuable link.
3. Use Analytics and AdSense on your page, so Google can monitor the traffic of your site and make sure many people visit your page.
4. Update your site and page often. Google gives priority to content that has been updated within a week for obvious reasons.
5. Avoid links from spam and fake sites. You can get blacklisted easily and you will do more harm with such links than good.

Don't spend too much time on SEO, working on your product is time better spent, because there is nothing better than being linked organically.

Since before OS X we've been using Stickies to hold small pieces of important information that we need at hand.

There is a really powerful small feature of the Stickies.app in OS X that let's any sticky note float over all other windows making it visible at all times. To make a sticky float above all windows select it and press: Apple-Alt-F (Command-Option-F)

This is really useful when you have to consider and copy info from several sources for the job you're working on. Remember you can have all kinds of info on your Stickies, not just text.