I’m not a fan of busy wallpaper on my iPhone and iPad home screen. It’s fine on the lock screen but when you’ve got a screen full of icons, a noisy background image gets in the way. So while I may have something fun in the lock screen, I generally keep things simple behind the home screen. Then I found this image of BB8 from Brazilian artist Jonathan Silva.

I started out with a cropped version for my lock screen but I wanted it to carry over into my home screen. For awhile I used a plain orange background cropped from the same image but that wasn’t BB8-ish enough for me. Then I tried using the actual image but had the exact problem described above. Specifically, I couldn’t find icons in it. So I decided to blur the image and it worked splendidly.

The idea occurred to me while I was holding my iPhone so I used Pixelmator as my weapon of choice. I already had the image in my photos library so I loaded it from there and selected the blur tool. The gallery at the bottom of this post walks you through the steps and the image below shows the final product. Now you may not be as enamored with a certain astromech droid as I am, but you may have child or a dog or even a bit of art worthy of the same treatment.

Opening in Pixelmator

Here is the image opened in Pixelmator for iPhone.

Opening Effects

Tapping the “Add Effects” button opens up …

Effects Options

There are several available effects. Tap the blur button.

Setting the Blur

Pixelmator does this with an on screen dial. I settled around 60%.

Cropping

For giggles, I also cropped the image to be more or less square for use on iPhone and iPad.

Saving to Photos

Finally, I saved to the Photos library. I’ve got a “Wallpaper” album for images just like this one.

Deron Bos wrote a nice little guide about how to turn your old iPhone into an iPod for your kids. It’s well written and includes instructional videos. If you’d like to repurpose an old iPhone for someone else this way, check it out.

Since Steve Jobs’ death, he’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and two motion pictures. It seems to me he is increasingly being painted in one dimension. People are eager to give him credit for everything that came out of Apple while at the same time boiling his personality down to nothing more than his worst traits. I never met Steve Jobs but I’ve known several people that did and the story I get from his friends and co-workers is that everything about Steve was the exact opposite of one-dimensional. 

I think part of the problem is that Apple is so secretive that much about Steve at Apple won’t really see the light of day for years to come and outside of Apple, he was very private. Either way, I do hope that at some point we’ll all back away from the caricature that has emerged over the years since his death.

I’ve heard from several readers that love their Apple Pencils yet bemoan the lack of a built-in clip. Turns out the Fischer chrome clip for their 400 Series Bullet Pen works quite nicely. Jeff Richardson put one through its paces and reports in at iPhone JD.

One of the significant developments of 2015 in the United States was the general implosion of some very traditional phone purchasing models. For years, we’ve been signing contracts and counting days until those contracts are over so we could get a new phone and sign up for yet another contract to start the process all over again.

Not anymore.

I was genuinely surprised how quickly that all fell apart this year. Recently AT&T announced that starting early next year they are killing contracts entirely. Verizon hasn’t made any such announcement but they are pushing non-contract plans and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them punt on contracts too.

It’s still unclear whether this will truly be better for us consumers over time but it is clear we at least now have more options about where we buy our phones. This year I bought a phone on a payment plan from Apple. It didn’t involve giving blood to AT&T and that felt pretty great.

Also still up in the air is the question of what impact these changes will have on consumers’ upgrade plans. Removing the arbitrary contract date may mean some people get off the 2-year upgrade cycle. Apple’s own payment plan makes yearly upgrades pretty convenient and I wouldn’t be surprised if this results in Apple selling more phones, not less.

Either way, we can remember 2015 as the year that cellular phone carrier contracts were put down. 

Now only if I could write a similar post next year about cable companies …

Episode 296 of the Mac Power Users is live. In it, we share some of our favorite tech products and services of the past year and our hopes for 2016.

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