“Aqua offers a photo-illustrative icon style—it approaches the realism of photography but uses the features of illustrations to convey a lot of information in a small space. Icons can be represented in 512 x 512 pixels to allow ample room for detail. Anti-aliasing makes curves and nonrectilinear lines possible. Alpha channels and translucency allow for complex shading and dimensionality. All of these qualities allow you to create lush, vibrant icons that capture the user’s attention.”

That’s what Apple says in the Human Interface Guidelines document about icons. Icons are a great way to convey information about the application you’re using and give you some eye-candy at the same time. In this roundup I’ve collected 50+ of the most beautiful, well-designed icons of 3rd party apps for Mac OS X. Do you know more? Feel free to share them in the comments.

Enjoy! ;)

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I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

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Iconpaper is a website that collects the best icons, walls and mods created by the Mac / iPhone community. It’s a great hub for all you customization nerds out there.

Here, I’ve picked 20 of the most recent awesome creations submitted to Iconpaper.

Enjoy!

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There’s a keyboard shortcut I use everyday, hundreds of times: Cmd + C, Copy. Everyone copies something every single day. Now, if you copy a lot of stuff and you use Mac OS, you should have noticed the lack of a built in clipboard manager which stores all of your copied data enabling you to paste them later.

Fortunately there are many 3rd party clipboard managers that can do this: in this roundup I’ve collected 15 of the most famous clipboard apps available for Mac OS X.

What I was looking while searching for a good clipboard manager was an easy to use app, yet powerful and with a good user interface.

Enjoy!

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I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

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If you’re an advanced user of Mac OS X, it’s very likely that you know what Terminal.app is. If you’re not, the Terminal is an application included in every version of OS X into the Utilities folder which provides a command line interface to manually control your Mac.

In this roundup I’ve collected the best links about Terminal.app: you’ll find the best commands, hacks and tips to get the most out of it.

Enjoy!

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In this roundup, we’ve collected 60 of the most inspiring Steve Jobs quotes.

Thank you Steve. Read more

Everyone is always looking for new, better applications. I think that’s a given. At least, every Mac / Pc / Whatever passionate I’ve met in my life was always open to suggestions regarding new, noteworthy applications.

Now, that of discovering and testing new Mac apps is a hard subject. I mean, since Apple opened up the AppStore, many things have changed: people are most likely to be given new apps (you know, the AppStore, Genius, “People also bought”) rather than spend 4 hours looking for some new solutions. Then, there’s the “indie” software problem: sometimes an indipedent developer can’t do big advertising campaigns, for this reason his app will remain unknown and only the “elitè” will use it. By elitè I mean nerds.

Anyway, I think there’s still a few number of users / nerds / call them how you want it who actually spend hours looking for the next big thing. Or there wouldn’t be indie Mac apps anymore.

Which are the best places to find new stuff? Keep on reading guys.

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