Desktop-itis

crazy desktop

If you want to be wigged out, imagine what it's like to have a grown man ask you what your Desktop looks like. Often they won't make their intentions clear from the start, but the trained eye can catch them trying to take a peek around your shoulder.

I hesitate to call it an addiction, but the aesthetic pleasure of one's Desktop for many can easily be categorized as a fetish. Like most fetishes involving technology, while they exist on other platforms, Mac users seem to have a higher number per capita.

They know who they are, and because I'm a man of many fetishes myself it's not something I judge. The problem is that when these people want to play 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours', since I've been an OS X user I freak them the hell out.

Click the above image and you'll see an example of why -- it's a shot of my Desktop while viewing the handiwork of someone much more disciplined than I. If you hadn't noticed, it's pretty much a mess, namely due to the fact that I have 470 items on my Desktop.

Scarily enough, that's only about a months worth of entropy -- previously we'd been up to 2,700 items on the Desktop.

Now, this is far from an ideal and does cause some problems, some more minor than others. As far as aesthetics go, it's pretty unsightly. After awhile it sorta blurs together into a semblance of a background pattern, but you have the idea.

This also isn't a performance-friendly situation. If you have an idea of how the Aqua interface is put together, you can see one red flag, but another is just the Finder itself. It's kind of frightening to boot and watch the Finder chug to display each item, or actually completely hang.

From a technical point of view, there's a glaringly big reason for the problem: there's no checkbox to not show items on the Desktop at all. You can shell out some cash to do it, but the one I looked at originally was pretty damn buggy, and when I'm shelling out money to remove one feature from an OS that can't be bothered to add a checkbox I'm not a happy drunker. It's not a big deal to have 2,500 items in a folder, it's just a big deal to be displaying them.

However, it's not the only reason. The files on the Desktop generally fall into three main categories:

  • URLs I've dragged from my web browser onto the Desktop as a .webloc file because I know I'm going to need them in the next while and I know I'm going to need to throw them into a specific folder lately. Originally, these were dragged onto the Dock if the browser supported it, but I quickly ended up with a Dock that would go no smaller and would add no more items.
  • Images and things I'm working with galore, that I always intend to file away but never quite get around to. Sometimes from a browser, sometimes via IM, sometimes via email. Sometimes it's just something I know I'm going to want to have, and just don't want to do with the whole save to disk somewhere thing. Snippets of text, etc. It's just so much easier to drag it a few pixels to the Desktop and move on to what I was doing. Sometimes it's something I'm going to need to use right away in another app, or read, and it's just easier to throw it there and grab it. Basically, I'm lazy.
  • Screenshots are probably the worst culprit in terms of sheer cumulative numbers. These get dumped onto the Desktop named Picture x.pdf, and I have folders upon folders of them that at some point I need to archive. It's not something I look forward to because the Finder can't give a preview via icon view, which would be the most expedient, so after awhile I just start a new folder and throw them all in... for someday.

The root of the problem is prolly that I'm lazy, but really excusing things as laziness only gets you so far and it's all a matter of degree. After all, laziness is the father of invention. The secondary problem is that I like to quickly grab what I need via drag-and-drop and then move on. The only real target for that is the Desktop, so it takes the major brunt of it.

I looked at the Dock, and I love the idea of having a folder in the Dock that I could drag things to. Basically, a catch-all, which isn't unheard of... Apple lets you change the 'Downloads' folder for Safari which numerous other apps will latch onto.

The problem is that while the Dock will accept a drag-and-drop operation from the Finder itself to a folder in the Dock, like say a file, it won't accept it from another app. You can't drag an image from Safari onto a folder in the Dock named 'Images', nor a bookmark file to a folder named 'URLs', nor a snippet to a....

I don't really know why it's this way, after four major revisions to the OS (three if you don't count the Public Beta), I can't be the only one who has hit the problem.

yummy alcohol posted button Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 28, 2005, at 01:20 AM


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