Photoshop is for designers. Wait, uh… no it’s for Photographers. The fact is, Photoshop is a useful tool for an awful lot of people. In the past that’s meant that you had to have your toolbar contain the balance of tools that Adobe thought you would need–including the ones you never use. That day has now gone, and your Photoshop toolbar can finally be YOUR Photoshop toolbar.

Simply click that 3 dot icon at the bottom of the default toolbar in Photoshop. This brings up the Customize Toolbar dialog box.

Now you can begin dragging items out of the toolbar (the column on the left), and rearranging them in the order you want. Don’t worry, dragging them into the column on the right doesn’t delete the tool, it just hides it from view.

You’ll notice that some of the tools are grouped. That’s what makes the sub-tools where you hold the mouse down on the tool to reveal similar/alternate tools—such as the Selection and Shape tools. You can create your own sub-tool list if you wish, or simply remove a tool from a sub group to give it its own spot on the toolbar. For instance, you could move the circular selection tool out from under the rectangular selection tool if you wish.

The best thing is that Photoshop allows you to save your new toolbar as a preset. So you could create different toolbars for different tasks and call them up quickly when you need to switch.

Why the heck Adobe hasn’t made this an option in InDesign and Illustrator, at the very least, is beyond me.

Remember ‘Stickers‘, the Apple commercial that showed-off decals on the back of a MacBook?

If you want to decorate your MacBook with a sticker, you can grab one from the commercial (or a number of other custom labels) from DecalGuru. In most cases the stickers cost $10-$13, but there is a section of $5 decals.

Vecte replaces Mac OS X’s built-in application switcher

Vecte is a simple Mac OS X application switcher replacement. All the standard keyboard shortcuts still work, the only difference is how it looks and feels. Vecte moves the application switcher overlay you get by hitting Command + Tab from the center of the screen to the top left corner of the screen. Vecte also switches apps instantly rather than waiting around until you let go of the command key. Finally, Vecte does not re-order the apps every time you switch to a new app. If you missed the app you were aiming for, it’s still in the same spot.

I used Vecte for a few weeks and found it to work quite well. And it’s a great way to customize OS X to your liking. Ultimately though, I prefer the built-in switcher. Given that Vecte is free, you have nothing to lose by checking it out. You can download Vecte here.

Some of the commands include: Always Show Hidden Files in the Finder, Speed Up Mission Control Animations, Change Where Screen Shots Are Saved To, and Show System Info at the Login Screen.

You can see all ten commands here.

Mac OS X was a top-to-bottom change to the system architecture, and theming was infinitely more difficult. It took a long time before creative developers figured out a way to bring customization to OS X. There were themes, if only a few dozen, and of course you could still customize icons. But it was never to the extent that you could in Mac OS 9.

Eventually (I don’t remember if it was OS 10.4 or 10.5), theming became nearly impossible. But when Apple released the Mac App Store, customizing your Mac desktop all but died. Because of the code signing of all apps sold through the Mac App Store, altering files contained in individual apps (such as icons) rendered them either useless, or at the very least prevented you from updating them in the Mac App Store.

Between code signing, recently implemented Sandboxing rules, and the release of OS X Mountain Lion (which prevents theming of the Dock), it’s all but a dead art. If you need any more evidence, Panic Software recently announced they were sunsetting their icon customization tool, CandyBar. For many years, CandyBar was the gold-standard of customizing icons. Thankfully, Panic made CandyBar freely downloadable, and updated it for Mountain Lion. For those like me who used CandyBar for it’s icon collection organizing feature, and the ability to quickly and easily export app icons as PNG images with transparency intact, the fact that it still works is a bit of relief. But it’s future is most decidedly in doubt. It surely won’t be long before it can no longer customize System icons.

It’s sad to see theming and customization fade off into the sunset. But to be honest, Apple has improved the appearance of the OS to the point where even the most avid themed simply preferred the clean look of the standard theme. And right now, you can get an absolutely fantastic icon customizing and organizing app for free.

You can create your own customized Mail stationery quite easily

This tutorial is fairly simple, and you’re only limitations are your graphics skills. Of course, if you have knowledge of HTML, you can do a lot more with your customization. For the sake of this tutorial though, I’ll keep it simple.

What you’ll need

You’ll need just a few things to create your own custom Mail stationery. First, you’ll need a graphics editor; I suggest Adobe Photoshop, but Pixelmator or any other app that allows you to save specific size files as JPG and PNG will do. Next, you’ll need a text editor that can save files as plain text; Apple’s TextEdit will do, but you can use any one you wish.

Step 1

Navigate to the root level of your Macintosh hard drive and go to: Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources.

Inside this folder, you’ll see five more folders named the way you see them in Mail when you click the Stationery button in the upper right corner of new emails. They are Birthday, Announcements, Photos, Stationery, and Sentiments.

Step 2

For the sake of keeping it easy in this tutorial, I chose to base my customized email off of one of Apple’s built-in templates called Sand Dollar Stationery.

Using Apple's own stationery as a starting point

Go ahead and open the Stationery/Contents/Resources folder. You will see 8 files and some folders (how many folders depends on how many languages you have installed on your system). Option-drag the Sand Dollar.mailstationery file to your desktop. We want to work on a copy of the file, not the original.

Step 3

Control+Click (right-click) on the Sand Dollar.mailstationery file on your desktop and select Show Package Contents.

Finding the stationery art files

Another Finder window will open. Go ahead an open the Content/Resources folders until you see the basic files for the Stationery template. Here you will see seven files and more language folders.

Step 4

Open the content.html file just to get an idea of the HTML structure of the final template file. You’ll notice that near the top of the HTML code, the Title tag of the stationery (Sand Dollar) appears. Change that to whatever you wish to name your file. You’ll want to use only characters and spaces (for whatever reason, when I used a hyphen or underscore it doesn’t work). Make sure you save the file as plain text, and with the .html extension.

Step 5

The Sand Dollar stationery is comprised of only a few graphics files:

• bg_letter.jpg
• bg_pattern.jpg
• bottom.jpg
• thumbnail.png
• top.jpg

If you look at the Sand Dollar stationery template in the Mail application, you’ll have an idea of how it all comes together. Now you just need to decide on what you want your stationery design to look like. Once you’ve decided on your design, simply open each of the four .jpg files and customize them.

NOTE: The width of the body of the message background is important. You’ll want the borders (if you choose to have them) to line up on the top, letter background and bottom JPG files. (see screenshot below)

Customizing the stationery images

Obviously the file named top.jpg is the “masthead” of the template where you can place a logo, photo or whatever you wish. As you can see in the image above, I created a completely new top.jpg file to replace the Sand Dollar and paper background.

Keep the background simple unless you really know what you’re doing. The background of the stationery actually resides in two different files. The bg_pattern.jpg file is what Mail tiles in the background of your email to fill the width and height of the entire Mail window, but the bg_letter.jpg overlays that, so the background in that file needs to mesh well with the background pattern. Be sure to save the .jpg files as the exact same file names.

Step 6 (optional)

Open the content.html file (if it’s not still open) to make sure your images have updated in the HTML. If you haven’t physically moved any of the files or changed the names, the HTML document should be perfect. At this point, you can also customize the “template text” that appears when you select the stationery in Mail. Go ahead and add a signature at the bottom with your Web address or whatever you wish. For my purposes, I chose to just leave the text alone since I don’t send out emails with boilerplate text in them anyway. Save and close the content.html file, making sure to save the file as plain text with the .html extension.

Step 7

We need to create a stationery thumbnail image, so drag the content.html file to your Web browser and take a screenshot of just the stationery itself (Command + Shift + 4 then drag an area to capture the image. I then opened the original thumbnail.png file and pasted the screenshot into it and resized it to fit. Don’t forget to save the thumbnail image as a .png, not a .jpg file.

Step 8

We’re just about finished. Open the Description.plist file in TextEdit. Make sure TextEdit is set to save files as plain-text, not rich-text. About 12 lines down you’ll see a “string” with the name of the template, in this case it’s Sand Dollar.mailstationery. Change it to whatever you named your stationery file earlier in step 4, keeping the .mailstationery part. Save and close the file.

Naming your Mail stationery

Now go into the English.lproj folder (or whatever language you happen to have your Mac display in) and open the DisplayName.strings file in TextEdit. Change the name at the end of the text again from Sand Dollar inside the quotes to the same name as in the previous step. Save and close the file. Again, make sure to save this as a plain text file.

Step 9

Now close the folders and go back to your Desktop and rename the package file Sand Dollar.mailstationery to whatever you wish, keeping the extension. In my case, it was Graphic Mac.mailstationery.

Step 10

Drag your new stationery package file from your desktop back into the original Stationery folder where you got it: Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/ Contents/Resources/Stationery/Contents/Resources/

Step 11

Close all the folders and launch Mail. Create a new email, then click the Stationery button in the upper right corner of the window to display the list of available templates. Under the Stationery item in the source list on the left, you should see your new template icon (provided you did create that thumbnail.png image. To make it easy, I dragged my new stationery template to the Favorites item at the top of the list. As you can see by the final product below, it works perfectly.

The final Mail stationery

Obviously, the more you know about HTML, the more complicated you can make your customized Mail stationery templates. That’s all there is to it.

Further

The original Sand Dollar stationery template I based this tutorial on happens to have a 540 pixel wide text area, which I found out by looking at the HTML code.

You CAN USE IMAGES in this particular email template, just drag your image from the Desktop into the body of the email. Obviously you’ll want to keep your image at 540 pixels wide, otherwise it’s going to make a mess of your carefully crafted email.

You CAN NOT USE ATTACHMENTS when you use Mail stationery other than images, so don’t bother trying.

All email applications are not created equal. For example, Gmail should display the email perfectly, but it will append the background image as an attachment at the bottom of the email. I’m not sure why it does it, but there doesn’t appear to be a way around it. Outlook on Windows sometimes makes a complete mess of emails sent with Mail’s stationery. Again, I don’t know why or how to fix it. Keep your expectations low and you won’t be so disappointed.

Icon Generator is a website and a companion Adobe AIR application, both free, that allow you to create your own CS5-style icons with little effort.

Create your own CS5-style icons easily

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can type in your own letters (up to 15, but it looks bad beyond three), choose a face and font color, and even add or remove icon shadows and glare. I should also note that if you preferred the Adobe CS4-style icons, you can choose that style instead.

But it Icon Generator doesn’t stop there. You can choose to use an image on the face of your icon, rather than letters. You simply upload a 512×512 pixel JPG or PNG file. As you can see below, the results are pretty darn good!

Icon Generator allows you to use images instead of text on your icons

Once you’re finished customizing, Icon Generator allows you to download a .zip file containing various sized PNG files of your icon, and even update your Twitter profile icon if you wish.

Icon Generator is free, so if you like the Adobe CS4 or CS5 icons and want to customize more icons to match, this little AIR app is just what the doctor ordered.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.

Though you can drag and drop items between tabs, you can also hit Command + U or double-click a tab while holding the Option key down to merge two adjacent tabs into a sort of dual-pane window. As you can see in the screenshot below, the dual-pane window shows both tabs in the same window, including the sidebar on each side.

Dual-pane tabbed Finder windows

Another really handy feature is the ability to invoke, via a keyboard shortcut, a window that glides up from the bottom of your screen, called the Visor. The Finder window fills the entire width of your monitor and about one-third the height. You can quickly hide the window with the same shortcut (double tapping the option key, by default). BinaryAge borrowed this idea from Visor, their app which pops open a Terminal window with a keyboard shortcut.

I found the Visor window feature to be somewhat annoying for me, but other users may love it.

TotalFinder doesn’t stop there with the features. You can also set TotalFinder to place folders at the top in list view, stop creation of .DS_Store files, and show invisible files in the Finder. All of TotalFinder’s preferences can be accessed in the Finder Preferences window by hitting Command + , while in the Finder.

TotalFinder is still in Alpha stage, but I’ve found it perfectly usable – experiencing no adverse behavior at all. The developer plans on charging for the app eventually, but until it’s 1.0 release, TotalFinder is free of charge. Considering how long it took Apple to add virtual desktops (called Spaces in OS X), this may be the only way to add tabs to Finder windows for a very long time.

SecondBar is a small utility that does exactly what you would expect, it adds a Mac OS X menubar to your second monitor; giving you full access to your Apple, File, Edit, View, Go, Window and Help menus, as well as placing a clock in the far right position.

What it will not give you is all the additional menubar application icons you may be used to, such as TimeMachine, Airport, DropBox, etc., as you can see in the screenshot below.

Standard Mac OS X menubar on top, SecondBar's menubar on the bottom

Now if you don’t have a second monitor, or you do have one and don’t see the need for a second menubar, you still might find a great use for this app – as I did.

SecondBar adds a killer feature to Mac OS X’s Finder, which is the ability to move and resize windows with the click of the mouse. As you can see in the screenshot below, the SecondBar preferences allow you to customize actions when clicking on the window action widgets in the upper left corner of each window.

SecondBar offers window size & position customization

This feature alone was enough to sell me on the app. With a 30″ LCD screen, I really don’t need a second monitor (though I do have one), but the ability to automatically size and move two windows to fill both sides of my screen is fantastically handy!

SecondBar is free of charge, but does come with an utterly annoying problem. If you DON’T have the second menubar showing (yes, you can turn it off for use with one monitor), you can’t access the preferences or quit the app – at least, I couldn’t find a way. This forces you to launch Activity Monitor and quit it there. Still, SecondBar is an incredibly useful application for those with a second monitor, and even those who don’t.

A quick visit to the Finder’s menubar does the trick! Simply go to View>Show View Options (or hit Command + J). In the View Options window about half-way down, click in the checkbox next to Show Item Info as seen in the screenshot at the right.

Once that option is activated in the Finder, you’ll notice information located just below the desktop icon file name colored in light blue. When you’re in icon view mode in a folder, which you can switch to by hitting Command + 1, you’ll see the info there too. As you can see in the screenshot at the left, you’ll get a quick glimpse of the number of items inside a folder, and the pixel dimensions of image files.

Not all document types display information, but these two in particular I find quite useful.