I’ve always wanted to use the default OS X ‘hero’ mail sound as my iPhone mail sound and finally in iOS 5, I can realize my silly dream of (almost) having a Mac in my pocket.  And so can you.

Here’s what you do:

• On your Mac, Spotlight search for ‘hero.aiff’
• Copy/Paste it onto the desktop (So you don’t accidentally delete because you’re a clumsy arse, like me)
• Drag the copy into iTunes.
• In iTunes, convert it to an .AAC file.
• Right Click on the newly created .AAC file in iTunes.
• Select ‘Show in Finder’.
• Find the file and notice that it’s an .m4a file named ‘hero.m4a’
• Rename this file to ‘hero.m4r’
• Drag file back into iTunes.
• Notice that the file is now in the iTunes Ringtones library, on the top left.
• Hook up your iPhone and sync to iTunes.
• On the iPhone, go into Settings –> Sounds —> New Mail and select ‘Hero’ (It will be at the top of the Ringtones section).
• That’s it.  Enjoy.

EDGE Touch is another iDevice pixel art editor,  so I guess I’m going to have to do a head to head review of this and Sprite Something.  There are some pros and cons to both.  Edge Touch utilizes a Dpaint-like paletizing and gradient spreading (superb!) but the animation interface is a bit clunky relying on layers.

I’m going to mess around with them some more and pick a victor.  Perhaps there’s a 3rd option?  Anybody know any other iPad/iPhone pixel animation editors?

Behold:  A Crow in his Crowship.

I made this animation with Sprite Something on the iPad.  It’s pretty fun and quite useable, but could do with some additions like cloud sync through dropbox, colour palletizing and a few other tools.  I do like that it builds sprite sheets and includes the info in an email (Along with animated gifs up to 4x the original size ).  Neat.

I haven’t touched pixel art in years, but now I’ve got an iPad, the idea of clicking pixels on and off again with a finger is fun.  Back in the early ’90s , I used Dpaint III on the Amiga for my sprites, backgrounds and animation.  I loved that software to death, but the mid ’90s saw me shift into Photoshop textures and polygons, as was the fashion back in those foolish days.  Recently, I got the urge to go pixelly again, so let’s see what happens…