A couple months ago, we launched the Bureau of Communication. Now, tens of thousands of forms later, we’re launching the Bureau of Communication Archive! We went through a bunch of forms that senders had marked as OK to share, removed any sensitive data, and put our favorites online in an archive for you to read them. There’s some pretty funny and charming stuff in there, along with some weird entries - it’s an interesting look into the minds of our users!

Check it out at the Bureau of Communication!

We’re happy to introduce our first iPhone project - Springlets! They are tiny apps for your iPhone’s Home Screen that help save you time. For example, lets say you want to view the wikipedia page for Applesauce. The old way would have you opening Safari, tapping the search field, typing in “Applesauce Wikipedia,” waiting for the google search results to load, tapping the proper entry, and waiting for the wikipedia page to load. The Springlets way skips right over a lot of those steps — you’d tap the WikiSearch icon on your homescreen, type in the word “Applesauce” in the resulting dialog box, and you’re whisked away to the appropriate page. This saves precious time! We’ve got Search Springlets for Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature, Chowhound’s message boards of amazing food, and IMDb’s archive of cinematic trivia.

Along with the Search Springlets, we’ve got two others to tell you about. The first is a speed dialer. You enter in a phone number and a name and suddenly you can have a way to dial a frequently used number without even opening the Phone app. The other Springlet is our favorite. It uses Google’s Mobile Proxy to load just the text of any web page. This is particularly handy with image-rich sites that take forever to load over edge. Just tap your Just Text Springlet, enter the URL of the site you want to visit, and it’ll appear nice and quickly.

For last years LOST Season Premiere, we made some lost food labels that ended up being pretty popular- so popular that Disney made us take them down! We still love LOST, and we came up with something new for this year - it’s the LOST Season 4 Prediction Form!

Click here to check it out!

With Macworld just around the corner, everyone’s waiting to see what will be announced. We’ve got some theories of our own (MacBook Air = MacBook + 3G chip = Internet everywhere!) though we’re crossing our fingers for an iPhone upgrade. What’s the problem, you ask? Not enough storage. Well, just in case tomorrow doesn’t bring that long-awaited 16 GB iPhone upgrade, we’ve got plans to introduce a new product. The Do It Yourself iPhone Upgrade Kit.

Upgrading will take just a couple of minutes and is easy enough to do at home or even while riding the subway. The kit includes an upgrade module, which you simply attach to the back of your iPhone using the included Instant Upgrade Adhesive Solution.

With only a small increase in size, your upgraded iPhone will offer additional features — double the battery life, double the screen real-estate.

Coming soon — only $499!

Now that the keynote is upon us, it’s time to post the winners of our Keynote Prediction Contest we posted about almost two weeks ago! We’ve been busy, but we managed to find the time to read every entry and choose our favorites. Our original plan was to choose one winner in each category, but there were way too many to be able to do that, so we ended up picking three! Today, we’re announcing the winners in the humor and creativity categories, and we’ll post the most accurate entries later this week. Each winner will get an Insanely Great Tee of their choice.

Humor!

First up is Daniels iPhone style keyboard…The most intriguing part is the auto adjusting layout. Until now, we always liked our keys to stay where we left them, but maybe a keyboard that’s constantly in motion is just what we need to get the new ideas flowing!

Nicolo jumped outside the box a little with this satisfying entry. We’re a little worried about what all those journalists were doing with their Newtons, but this does explain it’s demise.

Dave managed to find one of the few Apple product lines that desperately needs expansion. Our iPhones feel so naked, now!

Creativity!

Collin tried to find a way to resurrect the Apple TV by adding features of some of our favorite gadgets. It’s hard to say if an Apple TV/Wii or an iPhone/banana would really sell, but you can’t say it’s not creative.

We’re really not sure if Brett was going for humor, creativity, or accuracy…In the end, we decided that he’ll get a shirt for the ‘Historical Accuracy’ category (which is part of creativity, of course). We can’t wait for this new “Aqua” interface!

Daniel, the last winner of the day, really thinks big. We wouldn’t buy the product, but we were won over by his celebrity guest (and maybe we’ve got soft spot for his proclamation of love at the end).

That covers it for the winners of the humor and creativity categories. While we were going through all the entries to find the winner, we noticed a few things. Some were obvious, like ‘people really want a mac tablet’, or ‘everything thinks that Apple is going to release a sub notebook on Tuesday’, but some caught us by surprise. The most shocking thing of all was just how many people are anticipating Apple sex toys, Apple toilets, and even actual replacement body parts (and we don’t mean arms and legs!). We’re not going to post the hundreds of these entries we got, but we did have our lawyers clean one up so we can show you what so many of the entries were like:

Wow. Do you write to your mother with those hands? Anyway, to all you people who didn’t predict an iToilet (or worse), Check in later this week to find out who had the most accurate predictions!

Ever since we launched the Bureau of Communication, everyone has been asking when we’ll start offering printed forms. We’re working on making that a reality, so we were caught off guard when we found the B.o.C. in print sooner than expected — in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine!

We’re pleased as punch to see our little project taking off. And you’ll be pleased to learn that we’ve got plenty of tricks in store, including new forms (that elusive “Declaration of Romantic Intent” form is in the wings) and an archive of the correspondence users have marked as OK to share (it’s pretty fascinating to see what people are writing!) Stay tuned!

Macworld is coming!

Like a lot of you, we’re pretty curious to see what Apple will be coming out with next week at the Macworld Expo. We’ve got a few theories of our own, though time will tell how many of them come true. In the meantime, coming up with half-baked theories and trying to convince your friends is a pretty fun past time. That’s why we came up with our Official Keynote Prediction form. You fill it out with your theories and send it to your friends. Try it, it’s fun!

Now, just to make it more interesting, we thought we’d add a little bit of contest to the proceedings. So we’ve decided to give some free t-shirts to our favorite entries. Now, because not all of us have a crystal ball, we’ve created three categories with a grand prize winner in each. In addition to awarding the most Accurate entry, we’ll have a Humor winner and a Creativity winner. The prizes? Three Insanely Great Tees of their choice, in whatever sizes suit them.

For your entertainment purposes, we’ll be posting an archive of our favorite entries sometime soon. Check out the Bureau of Communication homepage for a link as soon as that becomes available. We’ll be announcing the results of the Humor Category and the Creativity category on Monday, January 14th right here in our blog. The winner of the Accuracy category will just have to wait a little longer until we can figure out which entry is the most correct.

May all your Apple Predictions come true!

FINE PRINT: Winners will be selected entirely at our discretion. Don’t worry, we’re pretty level headed. One entry per person, per category, please! Your entry and the ideas contained within become the property of Insanely Great Tees and Magnetism, and we may do with them whatever we please, including feature them in an archive, print them in a book or editing them for decency. And a warning: Predictions which are a little too accurate for comfort may invoke the wrath of Apple’s legal team, so if you’ve got insider information, be discrete about it, we don’t want you to wind up in court. Lastly, if you make any promises on the form (and you will!) you’d better be intent on keeping them!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve got a special treat for Insanely Great fans who will be visiting the Macworld expo. To celebrate their 15th anniversary, Ambrosia Software is going to be giving away a special custom designed Insanely Great Tee! Every hour during the show, 15 lucky people are going to walk away with one of these tees! Check out the image above, it’s a pretty classy design that’s sure to elicit comments.

It’s almost Christmas, the perfect time for gifts. Which is why we’re pleased to offer you something new over here at Magnetism — a brand new site we’re calling the Bureau of Communication. What is it, you may be wondering? It’s a new way of corresponding with your friends. Instead of composing emails, you can use our fill-in-the-blank forms and then email them along. We’ve got invitation forms, apology forms, birthday cards, everything.

How can you use the site? Let’s say your roommate is always tracking mud into the house and it’s driving you nuts. Using the Bureau of Communication, you could fill out one of our “Airing of Grievance” forms explaining how you feel and requesting how they change it. You could even include a request for apology. Email it along, and now she knows that she should use the doormat to clean her boots. She could even fill out a “Formal Apology” page and email it right back to you. The style is very proper, in fact they look a bit like victorian-era tax forms. It’s so serious that it actually comes across as pretty funny.

We’ve got a number of other forms as well, including “Official Invitation” and “Observance of Holiday” — the perfect Christmas card for those of you who haven’t gotten around to digging up people’s addresses and buying stamps.

Check it out!

Check them out, we think you’ll get a kick out of them. And we’ve got a lot more forms on the way, so stay tuned!

Over here at Insanely Great Tees, we use Mail.app all the time, whether it’s tracking orders, writing with customers or just sharing cool links with each other. Why do we use Mail.app so much? In part because we’ve made it easy. A few years ago we came up with a handy shortcut that we keep in our docks to make it easy to create new messages. After receiving a lot of positive feedback from friends, we figured it was time to share it with all of you.

What is it? An icon that you stick in your dock. When you click it, a new mail message opens. Pretty simple, right? Exactly. Yet, it’s awfully handy. So we’ve posted it here for you to download. Just click the link, open the .zip file and the file inside “Create New Message” will do just that when you open it. You can stick it in your dock (just drag it onto the right side) and you’re good to go.

Download Message Maker

Download Message Maker

How does it work? Applescript? Automator? A custom application? All those are too complicated and would use too many resources. This is the simplest solution — it’s just a hyperlink in a file. It uses the “Mailto:” prefix, your mac is smart enough to open in mail. 

Now, here’s a cool trick — lets say you send out a lot of emails to one person, your girlfriend, for example. You could create a custom “Create New Message” that opens a new message with her address in it. It’s easy — open a text editor and drag the text mailto:SampleEmail@Address.com onto your desktop. This will create a file that you can double click to open a new message.

Enjoy!