The new website for Campus Crossroads, a church on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just gone live. From their website:

We want to redefine church to our generation. For too long we have been taught that church is a place you go. It is a building; it is an organization. Biblically, the church is none of these things. It is a living thing; It is an organism. It is the body of Christ. It is active. It is revolutionary. It changes people, places, and whole societies. It feeds the poor. It takes care of orphans. It defends the weak. It heals the sick. It spreads the good news of the gospel. It is not self-seeking, but selfless. It is more concerned with building wells than building steeples. But most importantly, it glorifies God in everything it does.

This site moves the church away from their previous flash-based website hosted at Sitecube, a seller of “designer websites”, to a multi-user Wordpress installation that will hopefully be much easier both for the visitors and the staff to navigate, and much more conducive to frequent updates.

Notice a difference between the screenshot of iTunes 7.2 on the left and an unmodified iTunes 7.3 on the right?

That’s right, it’s actually iTunes 7.3 on the right. Apple has given in and changed perhaps the most offensive new element of the new iTunes back to the round blue shade of its predecessors. Whether this was from the collective disgust of iTunes users or Apple arbitrarily deciding that it didn’t like the dark highlight after all (the same thing happened with iTunes’ search field several versions ago, when the dropdown menu made a brief disappearance), I can’t help but feel that it’s a small victory on behalf of those of us who dislike the post-Aqua direction Apple’s interface design is headed.

But if you’re like me – not (completely, at least) satisfied until Aqua is returned to its former glory – there’s AguaT 1.2.6 hot off the presses and ready for the new iTunes 7.4.1.

AguaT 1.2.2 is out, this time with iTunes 7.1 compatibility. Though the update itself doesn’t bring much except that, preparing it went quite a bit differently this time.

Prior to this update, I used ResEdit to switch out the resources in the iTunes.rsrc file. I enjoy ResEdit; I’m comfortable with it, and I’ve used it a lot. Unfortunately, the MacBook Pro I recently got doesn’t run Classic at all. To this point, it’s been surprisingly not much of a problem: until now, I had yet to even desire to launch Classic.

So I had to use a different program. ResPlendence is too unstable and apparently unsupported, so I gave ThemePark a spin, which incidentally, has a cool new icon now and is free too.

Now ThemePark is a pretty slick program, but it’s a lot more specialized than ResEdit. It can only edit a few resources – graphical ones in particular, so I can hardly use it as a general-purpose resource editor, but it does manage these resources a lot better than ResEdit did. Specifically, I’m glad to see an icns editor for general reasons, and glad for a PNGf editor for the purposes of iTunes. And of course the PICT editor, which ResEdit had as well.

ThemePark is very consistent in its handling of these resources. Whereas ResEdit had virtually a separate sub-application for each editor, all of TP’s look and act virtually the same. The single-window interface is convenient too, though not without its disadvantages: I can’t browse the PICT resources all at a glance like I could in ResEdit.

It’ll take some getting used to: I can’t copy resources from the resource browser, so I can’t copy and paste multiple resources at once anymore (and even if I could, I can’t even see the resources from the browser), but on the other hand drag and drop from editor to editor is pretty cool, and so are PNGf and icns editors. The fact that it’s OS X native doesn’t hurt either.

ThemePark is certainly not a replacement for ResEdit – it looks like that hole in my heart is here to stay for now – but for the purposes of building AguaT installations, ThemePark works great.

I just got done designing the website for Dragonblade Computers, a computer repair company in Salisbury North Carolina. From their website:

Dragon Blade Computers is a computer company based in Salisbury, North Carolina. We offer a wide range of services, including repairs, upgrades, diagnostics, and building computers from the ground up. We can do work on laptops, notebooks, servers, and networks. Our Specialty is Windows based machines, but have no problem taking a look at Apple and Linux based ones as well.

The whole site is built on a Wordpress installation, and the logo was designed in Flash, which I’m coming to appreciate more and more as an awesome vector design app. From mockup to final product took about 4 days once the logo had been designed.

In related news, R.I.P. Screw Myspace, which has departed from these mortal rackmounts to the great webserver in the sky.