Make Your Email More Professional

I recently received an e-mail (and twitter follow) from CannotbeFound, a brand new collective of designers – for designers, who want to give some exposure to “the little guys”. The idea is brilliant and was inspired by London based collective Not In who say:

We just do it to provide a showcase for creatives and their work that you might not see elsewhere.

I think it’s great that CannotbeFound have brought this idea to Scotland and I hope it becomes a great success. The e-mail was invitation to contribute to the blog myself and I noticed that they had attached an Address Book contact card.

This is the first time I have seen (noticed) this and I thought it was a really smart little thing to do. Your email contacts can simply add the card to their address book and hey presto!

• It saves them the bother of making up a card for you (which they might not otherwise have done)
• It allows you to make it more comprehensive (you can add your logo or a photo as well as website address)
• It will help them remember you in the future
• It makes e-mailing you in the future a lot easier (they just type in your name and address book syncs to mac mail)

Here is the one that I made up:

If you have a mac and would like to know how do it yourself just follow these steps:

1. Open up ‘Address Book’
2. File > New Card (⌘N)
3. Type in your name/company name and your contact details
4. Tick ‘company’ if appropriate (this will switch your name around, making your business name the heading)
5. OPTIONAL: Click the bolder text with the arrows then click ‘custom’ to make your own field (i.e website address)
6. Double click on the greyed out silhouette to insert a profile image
7. Click choose to select an image on your computer OR click on the camera to take one if you have a webcam
8. Hit esc to come out of edit mode and save your card
9. Find your card in the ‘Names’ panel or search for it on Address book
10. Left click on it and click “ExportvCard…”
11. Choose a place to save it to and click save
12. Yey! thats you done
13. Now, next time you write an e-mail to someone new just send it as an attachment.

Change the iTunes 10 Window Buttons

The new ‘traffic light’ style window buttons on iTunes 10 are completely out of context to all my other applications. After having success changing the icon I decided to find out if it was possible to change the buttons. Much to my delight – it is! Unfortunately the site I found out how to do it on is “under temporary maintenance” so I don’t have a link but I can tell you how to do it:

• Close down iTunes if you have it open
• Open up ‘Terminal’
• Type or paste the following text on the Terminal screen:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES

• Click return and quit Terminal
• Launch iTunes

You should now have lovely aesthetically pleasing horizontal buttons. The buttons will remain horizontal even when you update your iTunes software. If you do decide however that you want the vertical buttons back then type the following text into terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean NO

Also, I had never heard of Terminal this before I did this but just search for it on your mac and don’t be scared of it. The icon looks like a blackboard.

Replacing your iTunes 10 Icons

My initial dislike for the new iTunes icon led me to discovering this tutorial from OSXDaily. It allows you t to have the new iTunes 10 BUT with the old iTunes 9 icon on your desktop. Just follow these steps:

• Click into your Applications folder and select iTunes
• Right click on the icon and select ‘Show Package Contents’
• Open the ‘Contents’ folder, then open the ‘Resources’ folder
• Find file called ‘iTunes.icns’ and make a copy of it on your desktop for backup purpose
• Replace it with the  old iTunes.icns file
• Start or restart iTunes

You can delete the back up image file once your finished and everything is working alright. Unfortunately you will need to do this every you update your iTunes software. This was the reason I eventually forced myself to accept the new impostor!

Little Snapper

I just downloaded Little Snapper, a mac application which lets you capture screenshots of entire webpages. Goodbye “4″ dragbox screenshots, hello pixel perfect, full screen “websnap” shots!

LittleSnapper was built to help designers and other creative-minded Mac users build up a design scrapbook. Whether it’s proofs of client work, live sites that interest you, or screenshots of your favourite Mac applications, LittleSnapper allows you to capture, organise, annotate and share them all – from one beautiful OS X application.

Little Snapper automatically categorizes all your snaps for you as well as storing the web address. It then allows you to edit these details, add tags or categorize them further with things like star ratings to create ‘Smart Collections’. It also lets you edit the websnaps, so you can crop areas, add shapes and even text!

As a graphic designer the uses for this app are endless. For example; I am currently designing a website for a client and this app will allow me to show the website design to him in a much more sophisticated way. The editing tools will allow me to communicate with him directly on the image – rather than having notes and questions in a separate email. The library will also allow me to store and refer back to images of the site being built.

I have started doing this already because the intuitive nature of it’s design meant I knew how to work it in about five minutes. (This video is helpful though) The interface is delightfully simple making the entire app a joy to use. It is quite possibly the most elegant, useful application I have ever downloaded.

I seriously recommend it.