Chris Meller

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.

Ready to Grab some Stellar Bliss?

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!

• iphone_planets.zip (865kb)
• iPhone Planets Flickr set

More to Come?

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!

Resources

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!

1. Little known fact: I have a moon globe. ↩

UPDATE: As requested, added iTunes store links for the incredibly lazy.

I’ve been asked by a couple people what apps I’m using on my retro original iPhone, so here’s a quick list, in no particular order:

• iNetworkTest - Speed Testing of EDGE / 3G. Their site even maps your location for each test, which is cool.
• VoiceRecord - For quick notes. The only thing I ever used regularly on my previously jailbroken iPhone.
• AOL Radio - There’s a good radio station out of Atlanta that broadcasts through it.
• Google Mobile - Have yet to actually use this, I just go to Safari, but I keep telling myself I’ll use it.
• NetNewsWire - Still too horribly slow, waiting for a new version for it to become really useful.
• Pandora - Works well, even over EDGE.
• Twitterrific - Free version.
• WeatherBug - Best weather service there is, and they’ve got apps for every platform imaginable. Interactive radar map kicks ass.
• Epocrates Rx - More for interest, since I was in health insurance previously. It’s a cool app to play around with for a while, and has limited use after that.
• Fuel Guage - Calculate your fuel efficiency. Really spiffy.
• Mobile News - Not particularly useful unless I’m stuck somewhere and bored, then it can be a quick way to get a current events fix, including local news (based on your coordinates).
• Facebook - Useless, but well done.
• Bloomberg - The ultimate stock market app. Kicks the default stocks app out of the water.
• Jott - Transcribe voice notes. You can’t beat that. Have yet to decide if it’s worth replacing Voice Notes or not.
• Shazam - Listens to a song and tells you the name, artist, etc. That’s so amazingly awesome I can’t even describe it.
• WordPress - I don’t blog often enough for it to be useful, but who knows…

Several times leading up to the iPhone 3G launch, I checked AT&T’s coverage map to see where they offered 3G coverage. I knew there was no coverage in my immediate area (Greenville, SC), so I was looking forward to finding a job in Charlotte, NC where they had very good 3G coverage.

Low and behold, while looking at a PC World article criticizing the 3G coverage, I load up the coverage map today and find that they have Greenville marked as a 3G area. Kick ass! Time to track down a store with an iPhone in stock so I can upgrade!