To start off this post, as you'll notice, there is now a new image to replace the fake leopard dogcow. I liked this one's simplicity and its old-school promoter style, so congrats to Patrick Yan for beating out a whole lot of other entries in the mini-contest I was running. Pat, you'll be receiving your prize package soon!

Moving on, there is one more final app I'm adding to the three Fake Leopard Contest prize packages, thanks to Dan Counsell at Realmac Software. Yep, you guessed it. Winners will now receive a copy of the venerable website creation application RapidWeaver, in addition to the plethora of other software licenses and goodies. Thanks to Dan for his donation. (And if you were ever interested in purchasing the application, note the $15 off discount coupon in their ad.)

And finally, I've been promising to show off a few promising entries. So here goes.

One entry that screamed for being shared with you guys was this fake Leopard About box from Alex Mason. "My mom could make that in Photoshop", you say. And I say, OK, sure, maybe. But not this well, and this'll save you guys all a helluva lot of time. The reason? Alex actually created a full app simply to imitate this well established element of any true fake Leopard screenshot. In his words:

[This is] an app to help out all the contestants. Simply just a fake "About This Mac" box for Leopard. very simple, very mac-like (well it is an Apple rip off, so it should be )"

Special thanks to Alex for going the full nine yards with this fake application, and as he wished, here is a download link for those of you who would like to incorporate this into your entries.

Moving on, a lot of you guys have decided to focus on or feature updated Aqua UI's to varying degrees of craziness. This one by Susumu is one that mixes elements of Vista's Aero and unified windows which I think turned out pretty slick:

Other features to note is Safari in the background with window content dividers (showing browsing and RSS at the same time, and also could presumably show your bookmarks or even other pages in separate panes) and a more graphical, Omniweb-like sidebar, and a Finder with what appears to be a view that includes Automator-like functionality. If any reader who can translate into Japanese can give some insight, that would be appreciated.

As I noted in past posts, there has been a fair amount of jokes and crazy ideas showing up in my inbox. This one deserves some special recognition for great execution. Presenting Telepathy: What Apple's been working on instead of wireless two-button mice. According to creator David Smith, he was going for "Pure Awesome", and I think I'll have to agree with him here.

The crazy part? Well, maybe it's not as far off as you think. Check out this video of some people playing Pong with their minds at last year's CeBIT if you haven't seen it before. Definitely one of the more entertaining videos I've seen in a while.

Hope you guys enjoyed this first sneak peak at a couple of early entries, and if you've been thinking of entering (or would like to modify your entry with say, this new About box), make sure to send them in soon! We're closing in fast on the contest submissions deadline (Midnight Friday, EST).