The iPhone’s screen is 320×480 and has two tall banners on its home screen, one on the top and one on the bottom. What annoys me about slapped-together wallpapers is how they just resize images to fit the screen and don’t take the banners into account. If images are blindly resized, the result is cutting off heads or logos that look amateurish.

In these examples, the images are resized in such a way that Master Chief’s head is obscured by the top banner, as is the Ferrari logo. I’m betting these were desktop wallpapers that were resized without thought to what would be obscured.

When the iPhone was first released, one of the first things I did was put together an iPhone wallpaper Photoshop template so that people would have a guide to what their wallpapers would look like when set.

In the screenshot of the Photoshop guide above, I made the important areas different colors so that it would be easy to see where the borders of the areas are, and I put guides in so that tools such as Marquee will snap to the correct position when using it. I also made the top and bottom banners a separate layer so that you can switch them on and off easily.

I hope that this helps many of you crop and size your iPhone images properly.

Click here to download the iPhone Wallpaper Template for Photoshop.

Just a few minutes ago, Tweetdeck released their app for the iPhone. Tweetdeck’s been known for being the first desktop Twitter application to allow you to organize the people you follow into columns of your own choosing. It’s a great app, but I had issues with it since I could never get the devs to do one simple thing: notify you only if you got a reply or a DM. It either notified you on new tweets from everyone, or none at all. I found that to be extremely frustrating since I like to keep my Twitter app in the background when I’m busy and bring it to the front only if I have a reply. Since the devs never did this, I moved on to Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop.

Now Tweetdeck is out for the iPhone and already I’m in love with it. The app handles multiple accounts with ease, and also allows you to do Tweetdeck’s trademark feature of organizing people into separate columns.

When the app starts, you put in your Twitter credentials, but before you get started, you’re asked to create an account on tweetdeck’s servers. I hope this allows you to save your column settings between the iPhone ad the desktop app which is due later tonight. That would save an enormous amount of trouble setting up your app’s looks since all you’d have to do is sync them.

When you’re done with that, you’re shown a zoomed out look of your columns. You can zoom them into 100% view by tapping on it.

If you want to create a new group, just click “Add Column” in the middle. The app goes out and seems to get the people you follow, but unfortunately it did not get a complete list of friends and therefore I had to deal with a partial list. Once the list comes up, you simply tap their name to add them to your list. If a person is not on that list, you can add them manually.

When you have multiple columns, arrows appear in the bottom corners, telling you that you can move from one column to the other. I’d prefer simply swiping the iPhone to do this to save real estate.

A neat trick? Shake your iPhone to refresh!

I’m going to play with the app more, but I think I found my new favorite iPhone Twitter application.

Things I’d like to see:

A different color for replies to me.

Black text on white background. The black background is annoying my eyes.

At first I wanted to use the MobileMe calendar sharing, but to add her I have to pay $50 for additional accounts. Also, it seemed from what I researched that you cannot sync a calendar for collaboration among several people in your “family”, they can only subscribe read-only. No, thanks.

Since we both have Gmail accounts, I looked into using Google Calendar sharing instead. I didn’t want to because I was under the impression that by doing so you’d wipe your contacts out of your phone in favor of Google’s Exchange settings. It turns out that’s only if you set up your Exchange account to sync your contacts. You don’t have to, you can leave that option off.

By turning off Contacts, you keep your MobileMe contacts on your phone. I personally find this quite unsettling because I’m afraid that one swipe of my finger can wipe out my entire contacts list. I’m too afraid to try it to see if it at least warns you that it’s going to happen.

When you create a calendar on Google, one is created in your name (eg: starman.me@gmail.com). If you’re making a shared calendar, it’s probably best to create a new one with a better name for who you’re sharing it with. Once it’s created, you can add people to have access to the calendar, and set permissions for them. My wife has full read/write access to our family calendar.

However, you’d think that would be all you need to do, right? Unfortunately, no. I couldn’t figure out why the shared calendars weren’t showing up on my iPhone, only my own personal one. After doing a lot of digging, I finally figured out that you have to go to http://m.google.com/sync and there you tell Google which calendars you want Exchange to show you. Note: This should also help non-iPhone users as well.

Now everything’s synced and we have a shared calendar. Apparently I’m going to be very busy next week.