I recently started to get annoyed at Debian because they seemed to go a bit overboard at being “cautious” when it comes to approving new versions of packages (Postgres 8.1, seriously?).
Originally I’d gone with Debian over Ubuntu just because it seemed to make sense: Ubuntu is based on Debian, why not go straight to the source?
Well, no more. You’re now seeing the new Ubuntu-powered Babble, on a fresh new slice of goodness. Yay, hurray, drinks all around…
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
- James Madison
I’ve always loved space (hey, I am a Star Trek nerd after all), and found images of space particularly amazing1. Staring up at the stars was always one of the most relaxing things I could envision, and planets were just amazing sights.
The default wallpaper on the iPhone is a beautiful picture of our home planet Earth, centered so you can gaze upon that beautiful ball any time you want. That’s all well and good, but what if you don’t want to look like a loser using the default wallpaper? What if you want a little added variety in your life?
Well, that’s what I wanted, so I scoured the internet and tracked down the best images I could find of our beautiful solar system. Some slicing, dicing and resizing later and we’ve got a beautiful collection of 9 planets ready for adding to your iPhone and perfectly sized to be a drop-in replacement for our lovely planet.
The easiest way to get all these beautiful images is to hop over to my Flickr set and pick out the ones you want. I’ve also provided a quick-and-easy zip file if you’re as addicted as I am and want to grab them all!
I would love to add some additional stellar phenomenon, assuming I can track down some quality imagery, so stay tuned for the possibility of more images to come. If you’d like to contribute your favorite Astronomy Picture of the Day in iPhone wallpaper form, please post a comment with a link!
I collected the images from all over the web, but NASA was obviously a huge help. Most of these were sliced up from some of their planetary size comparison images. Google image searches provided the rest.
The iPhone Wallpaper Fireworks Template was also a huge help in getting everything sized and aligned properly to show up exactly in the center of the iPhone’s viewable background area. If you’re making your own iPhone wallpaper, I highly encourage you to grab a copy!
One of the ‘Best Deals’ offers on Amazon today:
I just finished taking the 2008 A List Apart survey for people who are, one way or another, involved in web development. I didn’t take their survey last year, but I was surprised at the thoroughness of their questions in some areas. There was an obviously design-oriented bias in a few different places, but overall I think it should give some really great results.
Anyway, I encourage anyone else involved in web design or development to drop by and spend a few minutes answering their questions.
