Some of you may have heard of the website MacHeist in the past. Basically, MacHiest is a wesbtie where members are given the opportunity to live out some of those secret agent fantasies, including mission briefings, simulated web espionage, and a storyline packed with tech-mystery intrigue. Whilst doing all this, they have a chance of winning Mac software!According to the website, Tens of thousands of MacHeist members have experienced the Mac themed, puzzle filled missions, receiving over a million dollars worth of free Mac software so far.

But all this leads to the MacHeist Bundle. The MacHeist bundle started in December, 2006, and basically offered 10 great programs for Mac, all as a bundle for a very low price.

MacHeist is at it again with a new bundle for only $50US, that comprises of 12 programs. The bundle includes software such as AppZapper, iStopMotion, 1password and even CSSEdit, and lots more. Check it out here. You only have 7 days left to grab a copy!

The link to MacHeist’s website is a referral link, however, we do not profit from you clicking it. They just send us some free software. It really is a great package!

Over at Joy of Tech, they’ve done us all a big favor by putting together this well-thought out Celebrity Checklist for us to carry around at Macworld this year!

Some stars that made the list are Steve Jobs, Woz, Steve Jobs Wannabe (you know the look), Jill Bates (Microsoft Spy), and even the guy who still runs Mac OS 8! Wow, this looks like fun!

I really do find this interesting so I felt I should post about it so others can try it out. There’s a website called MyMiniCity, where you choose a name, type it in, and then then you’re provided with a subdomain (xxxxx.myminicity.com) that’s basically yours.

The aim of it is to hand out that link to your friends, and whenever somebody goes onto your page, you receive another member in your population. The bigger your population grows, the larger your city grows! And also later on, you’re provided with other links to hand out that will help increase your city’s transport, security, industry, business, and environment.

So head over to the site and make an account. Mine’s:

HTTP://BRYKE.MYMINICITY.COM

By the way, although it might sound like it, this isn’t a sponsored post. I just really like the idea of the website, and would love to hear what others think. Post your MiniCity in the comments!

Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.

In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explain it best (before & after):

Original post & creators of icons: here (Japanese, hence my post)

Download link: here

Now, to get the icons to stay on top of our stacks is a little tricky. First we obviously need to put the icons into the stacks folder(s). We could name the icon 0.app and sort by name to keep them up top, but this isn’t really practical for the Downloads stack, so we’re going to change the access modified date using the unix command touch. So open up Terminal and follow this example, replacing the location and name of the icon where neccessary.

	cd ~/Downloads 	

	touch -mt 202001010101.01 " Downloads "

This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Obviously you’ll need to change ” Downloads ” to whatever the folder/icon is named. The example is with the downloads stack but you can do it for any of them. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click/right-click the stack and Sort by:). Repeat for other stacks and enjoy.

Here’s a little collection of links put together at TUAW that will help you make your Mac more winter-friendly:

• http://www.xs4all.nl/~janswaal/MacOSXSnow/
• http://www.spindriftsw.com/
• http://arcticmac.home.comcast.net/apps/maclampsx.html
• http://www.anomalyindustries.net/holidock/
• http://www.dbug.org/publications/articles/winterizing.shtml
• http://www.bassetsoftware.com/osx/snowglobe/
• http://www.ittpoi.com/sno/
• http://www.freerangemac.com/
• http://www.jschilling.net/software.php
• http://www.jschilling.net/sw_xmastree.php

Enjoy the links and Merry Christmas (for under 2 weeks from now)!

As a kind of update to Bryce’s post Quick Look Your Folder, the same developer has now released a Quick Look plugin that allows you to check all the files archived into a .zip one. The link is here.

If you have a look above, you’ll see that I’m 88% addicted to Apple, according to a quiz on justsayhi.

The quiz basically asks you 15 multiple choice questions about Apple products/your history with Apple, then calculates a total score.

You can quiz yourself by clicking here.

Just recently I came across a fantastic little Plugin for Leopard users. Using the plugin from Taiyo@hatena, it’s now possible to Quick Look (a new feature of OS X 10.5) any folder. That way there’s no need to open a folder when you’re not sure if what you’re looking for is inside it.

The plugin’s available HERE.

Think Different was an advertising slogan created for Apple Computer in 1997 by the Los Angeles office of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day. It was used in a famous television commercial, several print advertisements, and several television advertisements for Apple products.

The Think Different ad’s great response can really be accredited to the music played during the ad (which we’ll talk about later on), and the black and white video used.

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Now that you know the basics on the ad, let’s jump right in and talk about how you can make your own Think Different ad!

You Need:
Music - http://itsallmac.com/files/Mac%…
Video Editor (Apple’s iMovie’s good enough for this)
Video Clips/Photos - Just really get some old photos/videos (youtube’s the good place to find videos), and make sure they have relevance to the text of the music.
YouTube Account - you’re gonna need somewhere to post the result! Make an account here.

What To Do:

1.. Find the videos/photos. As mentioned before, Google searches are an easy way to find photos of who you want in it (for example, Bono) and YouTube is the place for finding videos. Oh, and once you’ve found a video, you can download it by using an App called TubeSock.

2. Download the music from the original Think Different ad. Get it here.

3. Open up the Video Editor, and drag the movies/photos in, and the music in. Then put the cross dissolve/fade effect in between each clip. Make sure it’s a long fade, not a short one.

4. At the end of the video, make sure you put an Apple Logo or whatever other image you decide to use, and the ‘Think Different’ slogan on a black background. This gives it that extra Apple-effect.

5. Export into .mov, .mp4, .avi, etc. Anything that YouTube will accept (this way you can show it to the world!) will do.

6. Open up YouTube and login to your account (make one if you haven’t already). Then just simply UPLOAD YOUR VIDEO!

7. Post a link to your video here as a comment. I’d love to see your final result!

More iChat Effects is a collection of 24 effects for iChat 4 and Leopard. Some of these effects include a Mono Lisa picture where there’s holes for your eyes and mouth, a backdrop of people in Times Square, and even a spinning 3D Cube with you on the faces. What’s great about it, is that it actually works with Photobooth too. So once you install it, you’ll notice that not only can you turn yourself into a Hologram while talking to friends using iChat, but take a photo of yourself in Holographic form in Photobooth.

Note though that the effects are available for Intel processor. Some could be supported by PowerPC G4 or G5 in Photobooth or iChat, but others not.

You can grab a copy from Apple here.

It’s been attempted before, in the times of (kinda) old web 1.0, but without success. Now, with the rising of web 2.0, eyeOS comes as another shot for the idea. What idea, you might ask. As the title suggests, I’m talking about an online desktop. Really. A complete online desktop. It has got games, a word processor, contacts manager, mail application and even a browser. That’s right! You can even have a browser inside your browser!

An online desktop is a concept that has been idealized for amny years now. But it seems to be closer than ever to reality with the advent of web 2.0. Of course having a browser inside your browser doesn’t make a lot of sense, but what if are on the go and need to edit a document (and maybe you don’t like Google Docs or Zoho)? Maybe you only have your iPhone when that urge arises. What if you are in the middle of nowhere and just want to play some cards? Launch your phone and play solitaire (take that, Windows! - Hehe).

Of course I probably showed none great uses for it, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth it. That’s up to you. There are a lot more applications over there. You can make the best out of it for yourself. Just head over to http://eyeos.info and check it out. Registrations are free and your account is stored online, which means you can upload and/or save files at the desktop and they don’t get erased. It is still very new, but has got an enormous potential (specially being open source as it is).

This is such a great speech and video to go along with it.

Here we see Steve Jobs at a keynote in 1983 showing for the first time ever the famous “1984″ ad by Ridley Scott to an exclusive audience. The ad was shown on tv shortly after that only once during the 1984 Superbowl & never aired again & is considered to be one of the greatest ads of all time.

Steve Jobs’s face at 5:47 is priceless. Pic Here.

Halloween is coming up in just a few days, and what better way to celebrate it then making a Mac-o-lantern out of a Mac Classic. Some tape, a can of spray paint, and a graphic later you have the geekiest Halloween display around.

Via TUAW

At first glance of www.marbleofdoom.com, the mind wanders: “What the #!*@?”, well that was the case for me, but it really does confuse the viewer.
My first thought: “What is this spiral, and what does it want with my internet?” But then I realized, all it wants is my contribution. Well, really ANY Mac user’s contribution.

The idea of the website, is you choose a Mac program from the list of 10 programs (or other), and then select from a list of times (5 seconds to 5 minutes), according to how long it took to load that program.

Then click Add Your Time to have it added to the clock, which displays everyones waiting time all added up. Currently it is at 1 month, 17 days, 21 hours, 9 minutes, and 15 seconds. Quite a bit of waiting there.

There’s also another little handy feature available: See The Data, where you can view how much time has been wasted on each program has wasted in total. So far Firefox is leading the way (at least it’s free), with Photoshop close behind.

Anyway, check out the website and have fun counting wasted time.

This is really really cool. Over at cultofmac.com, there is a post I found about an Apple Product Timeline Map, that was made by them.
This timeline basically shows every product made my Apple in all production fields, along with a picture, a date, and a name. It is very interesting to see how often Apple released a new product in their early days, and when they branched out into iPods.

You can also view the .pdf by Clicking Here!