The abuse of the computer desktop
My Living Desktop brings a whole new dimension to your computing experience by turning your Mac’s desktop into a beautiful, moving environment…. even complete with soothing sounds.
Always thought this was kind of cool.
I really have to disagree with you there, Jim. Ever since I first saw a similar feature in Windows Vista I’ve thought this was stupid. Judging by the dates, the Windows one came after My Living Desktop’s product, though fortunately Microsoft has now sensibly removed it from Windows 7. Animated desktops are even worse than static but overly-detailed desktop pictures at obscuring the actual contents of your desktop, and thereby making it harder to use your computer.
I tend to feel that if your desktop is showing you pretty pictures, there’s a better way you could be using your computer. Too often I’ve seen people in offices with a dual monitor setup, and it seems the only purpose of their second monitor is to show them their desktop wallpaper.
So let’s go back to basics. What is the purpose of your desktop? Sadly, Windows software has obscured the real answer to this. In Windows, due to the fact there hasn’t been a best-practice way to launch commonly-used applications in the past, the desktop has become a place to throw a shortcut to every application you ever install. The Start Menu and Quick-Launch Bar made efforts to stem this, but Windows software makers seem to mostly have ignored them and stuck with desktop shortcuts… or they put a shortcut in all three. Macs don’t really suffer from desktop shortcut proliferation in the same way PCs do, possibly because first the Dock and now Launch Pad have been established as proper places for shortcuts. Pre-Lion, you certainly saw Dock shortcut proliferation, where every app installed was added to the Dock; this was even worse than desktop shortcut collections. But at least the purpose of the desktop itself was somewhat preserved.
So again, what is the purpose of the desktop? The computer desktop should be the home of things you are currently working on, or need quick access to: just like your real, physical desktop. That’s why the metaphor exists. Turning your desktop into a video player is not helping with that purpose.
In a similar vein, if you ever see what’s on your screensaver then you are again missing the point. Modern computers are less-prone to screen-burn, so there really isn’t much of a point to a screensaver any more. Instead, your computer should be going into some sort of power-saving mode, like turning its screen off. People who watch screensavers could be saving energy instead.
The same need for simplicity goes for home screen wallpapers on mobile devices. When Apple introduced the ability to change the home screen wallpaper, I was actually quite disappointed… now people had the ability to make their iPhones ugly! It seemed to me it was clearly a move Apple had made because pretty wallpapers on Android looked flashier than the black wallpaper on the iPhone. It didn’t matter that the black wallpaper was infinitely more functional, just that if a regular shopper saw one phone with a black background and one with a pretty picture, they’d go with the pretty one. People certainly love personalising their wallpaper, but the truth is that anything other than a plain background is making your device harder to use.
So, although it’s seemingly boring, I’m a big advocate of simple, plain desktop wallpapers. I am not, however, an advocate of seeking out the most minimalist desktop you can find on the Internet: after all, you should be rarely seeing it. The default Windows 7 wallpaper actually works better in this regard than the default Lion wallpaper: I still have the default Windows one at work, but one of the first things I did was change the Mac’s busy and flashy starfield to a plain, single-colour background. I’ve also changed from the distracting “wet” wallpaper that comes as default on the iPhone, and chosen something a lot more subtle and functional. Desktops and home screens have a purpose, and obscuring this purpose with an overly-elaborate wallpaper is not something I recommend if you want a healthy user experience.
