Although the presidential election is over, Obama-inspired design seems to have made a lasting imprint on American culture. If you loved those Shepard-Fairey-designed HOPE posters that the whole Internet seemed to be making parodies of, you can have the effect for yourself in Apple's Photo Booth. Here's how to do it, using the Obamafy plugin.

Once you've downloaded the .qtz file, move it to Compositions in your Library folder. Once you've done that, open up Photo Booth and click effects. You might have to cycle through to the last page of your effects to find Obamafy, but it should be there. It took a little bit of experimenting for me to find the right lighting to get a result that looks like the posters, so don't give up without playing around a little bit.

Designers know the words "lorem ipsum" all too well. If you've mocked up a layout for anything with chunks of text in it, you've probably run across the infamous Latin paragraphs that commonly show up as filler. Where do you get your lorem ipsum, though, and how do you make sure it's the right fit for your design? Lorem2 is one great way to do it.

Lorem2 is a nicely laid-out collection of lorem ipsum paragraphs and bullet points, both short and long. If you're the kind of person who keeps a text file full of this stuff, you might be better off filling it up with the whole contents of Lorem2. You'll never have to give a second thought to avoiding repeated text that detracts from your layouts, because the solution will be close at hand.

Is there anything more addictive than Twitter? If you're in full-blown Twitter addiction, you might be looking to spruce up your Twitter profile page. While you can change a few of the colors, the most effective way to differentiate your Twitter profile is to change the background image. If you want something professionally done that will really wow people, check out Twitter Image. They've done free designs for a number of well-known twitterers, and you can browse through screenshots of the professional designs they've done. Or, if you like, you can browse their currently two pages of royalty-free generic background images.

The free ones are part of a limited time offer that Twitter Image is offering for popular twitterers. If you have more than 2000 followers, Twitter Image will create you a custom background for free. For everyone else, they are currently offering 25% off (or more) of the $100 price, though the "or more" part is not clearly defined.

What I'm wondering is if there is actually anyone out there that is willing to shell out $100 for a background image for their Twitter page? While I'm not a heavy Twitter user, I follow over 100 people regularly, but do so almost entirely through client applications - in my case, Twitterrific on both my Mac and my iPhone. I could care less what background is on my own Twitter page, much less those of the people I follow - in fact, I find the customizations either forgettable, or annoying.

Am I out to lunch? Is there a market for $100 background images? Where do you stand? Let me know in the comments.

While Vista has now been available for almost two years now, there are a lot of people that are happily sticking with XP, myself included. And while there aren't enough flashy features to tempt me to switch to Vista, one that I do like the look of is the Vista sidebar. Happily, deviantart user joshoon has posted a package that allows you to install the real Vista sidebar on your Windows XP computer.

Installing the sidebar consists of installing three packages: Alky for Applications, Windows Sidebar Installer, and Gadget Extractor. Alky for Applications is where the magic happens allowing Vista-specific software to run under XP. An interesting side-effect of installing the Windows Sidebar Installer is that the Vista-specific fonts are added to your XP installation.

Because this is an XP-compatible version of the actual Vista sidebar rather than a copy, all of the widgets that you could install in Vista will work on XP.

[via Lifehacker]

If you don't know anything about the iPhone, the MobileSafari browser, or web design in general, creating an iPhone version of your website can be daunting. Intersquash.com makes it easy. Just put in the address of your site's RSS feed, give it a name, and click iPhoneize. If you want, upload an icon. That's all you have to do: Intersquash gives you a little bit of code to paste into the body of your site, and it's magically optimized for iPhone viewing.

Last time I looked, Intersquash had already iPhonized around 2,000 websites. The results are nothing fancy, but you get a clean, readable, functioning iPhone site. It definitely beats making iPhone users wait for for your full site to load. You do need a working RSS feed to use Intersquash, but you've probably got one of those if you use any major blogging platform. If you're having problems, try a service like Feedburner.

There are plenty of online image editors out there, but it can be tough to find the right one. If you're looking for a few filters, a bit of layer support, and a decent range of tools, Pixlr might be the one you want. You'll be familiar with its tools from using desktop apps like Photoshop and The Gimp, but it's rare to see so many advances options in a web app.

Some of the Pixlr perks that surprised me: opacity sliders! Layers and transparency! The collection of filters includes halftones, scanlines and pixelation. Common (but useful) features like hue/saturation, resizing, and brightness/contrast are also intact. Next time you find yourself on a computer without Photoshop, you might also find you don't need it.

Download Squad isn't alone when it comes to awesome redesigns -- today, Weblogs Inc.'s parent company, AOL, launched a totally redesigned AOL.com. It looks pretty great, especially when you compare it to the other portal offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The biggest change comes in the form of allowing direct access to outside content -- including e-mail providers like Yahoo and Gmail, social networks like Facebook and MySpace and links to non AOL sites via a new RSS reader built into the site.

I had the opportunity to talk to James Clark, the VP of the AOL.com portal, about the redesign process, both from a business and web development level, as well as ways AOL is hoping to use the newly designed page to help transform the AOL brand.

Redesigning a site of any scale can be a challenge, but redesigning a site that receives over a billion PVs a month opens up an entirely new set of both business and user challenges. Starting in 2007, the AOL team started doing research on how its competitors display the web and more importantly, how end users (not necessarily AOL users, just Internet users) use the Internet. James told me that what they found was that the "one size fits all portal was outdated and outmoded." In this day and age, even traditional AOL users get content from multiple services and expect a level of control that traditional portals just don't give them.

Last month, AOL addressed those needs by implementing the ability to check and view e-mail from other providers -- like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail -- directly from the AOL.com page, the same way AOL users can access AOL mail. Today's redesign continues with that trend, offering access to MySpace, Facebook, and AIM (Twitter and Bebo support will be complete very soon) all from AOL.com. You can even update all profiles simultaneously directly from the toolbar.

Additionally, users can add their own links to pages right at the top of the screen (and you don't even have to register or login to access any of this stuff -- not even Google will let you customize stuff without logging in with a Google account). Probably the coolest feature is at the bottom of the home page. AOL has integrated an RSS reader into the page. It comes preloaded with categories and websites, but you can add your own categories and your own sites. Even more interesting, the sites aren't just AOL properties. In the Tech section, for instance, CNET, TechCrunch, Slashdot and Wired are all listed -- and none of those sites are affiliated with AOL.

If you're not sick of the campaign open season yet, and need some way to show some love for your candidate's website, VotetheSite might be for you. Okay, officially you're supposed to vote on which political candidate's website you think is the best. But c'mon, I doubt most people will go to the trouble of analyzing the candidates' sites for usability and features. You're going to vote for your candidate, right?

The site lets' you vote for the presidential site you like the best as well as US Congressional sites by state. If you register, you can add all the commentary you want. The site was developed by New Media Campaigns, a North Carolina website development firm. From what I can tell, they do work for both Republicans and Democrats so it appears you're entering neutral election territory.

Here at Download Squad, we're definitely non partisan. Let us know which "site" you think is better, strictly from a geek perspective - McCain's or Obama's.

Ever wish you could resize an image without losing the elements that really make it pop? Seam Carving GUI is a utility that lets you remove the elements that don't matter in an image rather than just cropping the edges. So if you want to say, take a picture of Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld and resize it without shrinking Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, Seam Carving GUI can remove parts of the background, bringing the two figures closer toegether and giving you a smaller photo without removing the elements you really care about.

The program can make a semi-educated guess as to which elements are safe to remove. Or you can highlight the areas you want to keep or remove before hitting the reize button.

There was a lot of talk about seam carving last year. The developer who came up with the original concept was hired by Adobe. And we've seen the technique show up i na number of other applications, including web based image editor FotoFlexer. But Seam Carving GUI is a simple tool that does one thing and does it both well and quickly. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

It hasn't been all that long since I wrote about 10 excellent themes for my favorite Mac newsreader, NetNewsWire. In that time, though, I've discovered a new style that I think is the best yet. It's Bullitt, designed by Cameron Hunt of cameron.io. Cameron is also responsible for some of the most popular (and best-designed) Tumblr themes in the universe.

The main selling points of Bullitt all have to do with readability. Column widths are optimised for your viewing pleasure, and images up to 700px should fit comfortably into the layout. Titles are handled with a neat, elegant slab-serif, and each site's favicon is displayed in the heading. The overall look is extremely easy on the eyes; this is definitely my favorite style for reading long articles. Even more attractive, Bullitt uses css ad-blocking (as if it weren't clean enough already!)

I still endorse the 10 styles I covered before, and this sort of thing is definitely a matter of taste. If none of those really struck your fancy, though, give Bullitt a try. After using it for a few weeks, I can't imagine going back to anything else.

I had the most interesting conversation with one of my friends the other day.

Adam: "Whew... finally finished with my latest web project!"

Friend (in awe): "Whoa! That's awesome! How did you make that?"

Now, of course, this project of mine was a full-fledged ASP.NET web application; a simple question like "how did you make that" could easily end up with me not only explaining what I did, but how I did it, and which tools and technologies I used. That way, instead of wondering about the magic that makes all those fancy programs out there on the internet work, my friend could understand exactly what goes on to make that happen.

Well, that couldn't hurt, right?

Adam: "Do you really want to know? I'm warning you... this could get messy."

Now, at this point, my friend gives me one of those funny looks like I'm completely crazy. But being a web developer, I'm already used to that.

Friend: "Well, sure..."

And so it begins.

Some web designers have an uncanny ability to look past all the text and advertising on a webpage, directly at the structure of its design. Now one of them is letting you do it for yourself. Paul Armstrong's project "Web Without Words" started as a bare-bones blueprint of CNN, but is now an ongoing experiment. You can even submit your own site to be considered for the Web Without Words treatment.

Replacing all the words and images with plain blocks is interesting all by itself, but Armstrong's analysis make the site fun to read, too. He refers to Yahoo.com as "a Starbucks-drinking, Gap-or-Talbot's shopping, trend watching fellow," and calls CNN.com "the know-it-all of news sites." Whether you agree or not, it's at least thought-provoking, and at best could inspire you to take a hard look at your own site design.

I've been using Faststone Capture portable for ages to handle my screenshot tasks, but PicPick is a very capable alternative.

PicPick provides the usual capture functionality and Windows hot key replacements (print screen and the control + and alt + variations), but it doesn't stop there. The integrated editor is packed with features, and can easily handle any quick edits I need for creating documentation or blog posts.

The editor's tabbed interface makes working with multiple images easy, especially when working with the repeat function to re-capture the same region for, say, a step-by-step installer tutorial.

Since most of my screen captures have to fit into a 500 pixel <div> tag, I was eager to test PicPick's ability to scale images. Resizing is very good, producing reductions that are on par with those created by CS4.

Over at TUAW, I listed Coda as one of my favorite applications, and indeed, it is a central part of my web development toolbox. When it comes to straight CSS editing, however, my favorite app is CSSEdit. CSSEdit by MacRabbit is the best CSS editor I have ever used. In fact, before CSSEdit, I was against the entire idea of a CSS editor -- isn't Notepad or TextEdit enough? Sure, but I like to save time and do things as quickly as possible, and this is where CSSEdit comes in.

My favorite feature of CSSEdit is the Live Preview and X-Ray inspector. Similar to Firebug (but with a much better interface that is less cluttered and much more accessible), CSSEdit shows changes you make to a stylesheet in real-time. There are also bookmarklets available for your browser that will open and edit the CSS stylesheet in CSSEdit with one-click. You can alternatively just load up a site and extract all stylesheets that the site uses and then manipulate them to your liking. It is a very handy way of seeing how certain stuff is done or isolating a problematic element.

For the user who is new to CSS, CSSEdit is nice because its dual visual/source code interface makes it easy to change elements of a stylesheet, like color or border type without having to know exactly what you are doing. For those of us that like to hand code everything, the automatic suggestions (based on what you frequently use) and the auto-insertion of brackets and appropriate spacing is a huge time saver.

To top it all off, CSSEdit has W3C Validation built-in. There are tons of great web development tools for the Mac, but when it comes to working with CSS, CSSEdit is my favorite, hands down!

If you work with colors on a Mac, you'll probably love Mondrianum. It combines the functionality of Adobe's popular color-theme creation community, Kuler, with the native color pickers of Mac OS X. When you open the color picker window in the apps you normally use -- everything from Textedit on up to Coda and Photoshop -- Mondrianum will be right there alongside the color wheel and the crayon picker.

Mondrianum lets you access Kuler themes right from the picker window, allowing you to choose an appropriate palette for the project you're working on. It integrates so seamlessly, it feels like it should have been there all along. If you checked out Mondrianum when it was still in version 1, your copy is about expire. Download version 2, which now works on both Tiger and Leopard, and responds to some changes in the Kuler API.