“MacThemes’ Theme For a Week Contest’s first act has drawn to a close, and now it’s time for the user’s involvement. 55 titillating entries are competing for a chance to be one of the three winners of a software cornucopia worth over $1000. With such a grandiose prize at stake, we want to make sure that the winners are deserving, and so half of the total score of a theme will be based on the popular vote, so come one, come all, and vote for your favorite and most deserving theme. Starting today, August 8th, voting opens to MacThemes frequenters and outsiders alike, and to give the indecisive among us as much time to ponder their choice as they need, voting runs until Wednesday, the 15th.” from the contest page.

I’ll be judging these over the next few days, but from my initial peek at the over fifty theme mockups submitted, there are some pretty promising themes in the batch. (The top three winners will be fully created into a working ShapeShifter system theme.) A few of my initial favorites below (personal judge commentary coming soon on the contest page): Continue reading…

The Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest quite honestly launched with some ridiculous publicity… apparently something about the idea of a contest with users trying to imagine a better OS X struck something within a lot of people, resulting in over 100,000 visitors and more than 40 entries. Well, that and the equally ridiculous prize package valued at over $1000 per winner, graciously donated by 28 Macintosh software companies and services. For a fake screenshot.

I won’t delay any further, with an earlier slipup due to forum downtime having caused a lot of feet tapping and general discontent. But hopefully these will get your imaginations flowing, some Apple engineers nodding their heads, and make your day just a bit more interesting. Without further ado… presenting… Continue reading…

Just wanted to drop a note, the winners (plus three runners up) of the Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest will be announced this afternoon. The deliberation was intense, but the results are finally all in, and everything is being put together now. This’ll be a fun post.

Over 40 entries so far for the fake leopard screenshot contest, and less than 3 hours left till the deadline. Good luck to all of you who entered, we’ll be starting the deliberating tomorrow!

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. Continue reading…

Many, many, many of you guys have emailed me or messaged me on AIM over the past few days about MacThemes Forums being down. (Seriously, tons of you. You never know quite how popular something is until something goes wrong, as I found out!) Basically, the hard drive at the data center hosting the forums got hosed, and unfortunately, while we were led to believe backups were being made on separate disks, it turned out that they were being made on a partition on the same disk. Which of course got hosed as well.

The good news? The forums should be back up later today or tomorrow at the absolute latest. James Cox, who hosts the forums (as well as Growl, Quicksilver, and other cool projects at cocoaforge) is working hard on restoring everything, so hang tight. (And for the record, he’s not the one to fault for the whole disaster, he’s currently also giving hell to the data center.) Things got pretty hairy back there, but the worst is past. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone!

Another note: I’m currently stealing a wifi connection from a neighbor, we’re cleaning up at the house now, and should be back ‘home’ by later today, at which point I’ll announce the winner of the mini-contest. If you were planning to enter, be sure to sneak in your entry soon, as only entries submitted by 12PM EST (about 2 hours from now) will be counted.

The Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest is off on a spectacular start, thanks to an incredible amount of publicity from the Macintosh media and an equally incredible amount of generosity from sponsors.

As you know, the bounty on the winning fakes was valued at just under $900 per winner. Today, I’m pleased to announce that with the addition of 7 new sponsors, the bounty has now been pushed to well over $1000. Thanks to the following developers for adding their software to the list:

• EarthDesk ($12.95), Xeric Design, Inc
• Mountain Tanks ($14), Battery Acid Games
• Speed Download ($25), Yazsoft
• Pixadex ($18.95) and CandyBar ($12.95), Panic & The Iconfactory
• DockStar ($8), Ecamm Network
• Painter’s Picker ($15.85), Old Jewel Software
• iFinance ($15), Synium Software
• Wallet ($14.95), Waterfall Software

Hopefully this boost to the prize package will get even more of you entering. I’ve already seen at least 15 entries submitted or in the works, and it’s only been two days since the announcement, which is pretty nuts. Entrants have come up with some pretty crazy updates to Aqua, 3D finders, distributed software updates, advanced tagging, album art browsing in iTunes, split safari windows, and more. I’ll be displaying a couple of early entries in a few days, so keep on visiting!

In addition, I’m getting a little tired of the Fake Leopard Dogcow for the contest image, so I’m holding a mini-contest with this post for its replacement. Just post your entry in the comments section over the next couple of days, and I’ll announce a winner on Friday, 12:00 in the afternoon EST. The prize for this one will be a copy of xScope ($16.95), Menuet ($12.95), Picture Framer ($5) and To Do Tracker ($5), DomainTracker ($24.95), ShapeShifter ($20) and WindowShade X ($10), and NotePad ($7.95). That’s over a hundred bucks of software for a small graphic, so hopefully you guys will come up with some neat stuff! (And thanks again to the sponsors.)

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I am starting to get really pumped up for WWDC, now just under a month away. Why? Well, I’m definitely expecting some new hardware from Apple. Mac Pros seem pretty likely. But what I’m really anticipating is the first sneak peak of Mac OS X Leopard, or 10.5.

Of course, it’s still just under a month away. And frankly, while I love fake screenshots (I really do, they make you think, and sometimes they turn out to be, well, not so fake after all), the ones that have been popping up so far have been pretty disappointing. Tabbed Finder? Ok. iTunes style metal UI? Sounds good. Multiple desktops support? Sweet. Virtualization of Windows apps? I’m hoping for it. But let’s be honest, Leopard could be sooo much cooler, and so could the fakes.

So, as my blog starts its second week of existence, I am kicking off a Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest. (Tagline: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a fake one is worth nearly a thousand bucks of software!) If you think I’m joking, think again. I am being utterly, 100% serious. What this ultimately is is an exercise in conceptual UI design, and I am hoping that by the end of it, the three winning screenshots will be much cooler than the real Leopard’s ever going to be. Well, ok, admittedly I’m secretly hoping that Leopard will trump these, but hopefully for the sake of this contest, this hope will prove outrageously false.

So, about the three winners. Winning usually involves prizes, does it not? Absolutely! So, to provide some incentive beyond recognition for your 1337 UI design skills, I have put together a rather awesome prize package of freebies, valued at just under $900 for each winner. Without further ado, presenting the bounty for an awesome fake screenshot: Continue reading…