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.
Example wallpaper mock-up: Pluto.
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!
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!
- Little known fact: I have a moon globe. [back]
What’s with the Vista SP1 Delay?
Vista SP1 was RTM earlier this month, and they announced a laid-back release schedule.
Their plans for slowly rolling it out to end users sound great, but I have to wonder why Microsoft doesn’t plan on releasing SP1 to IT Pros through TechNet until it’s publicly available for users to download.
This seems like negating the entire point of the TechNet community if you ask me. It’s there so its members can get their hands on essentially all of Microsoft’s software for testing and pre-deploy purposes. Several Windows 2008 Server builds have been on TechNet, and it was available for full download the day it went RTM. Why, then, is Vista’s service pack different?
Update: Per the rumors, the release schedule for SP1 has indeed been changed, so that technical users get updates sooner than expected.
I still don’t understand why we’re waiting for TechNet. If nothing else, those users should get it at the same time VL customers do - they’re likely one and the same people.
I was waiting to rebuild my Vista box at home1 until SP1 was available, but it looks like that’s still going to take too long. Maybe I’ll move ahead with my plan to make that box a Windows 2008 Server and using my Ubuntu laptop as my primary machine…