September 11th, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

This is the desk­top on my Mac­Book - pretty boring. I like to keep every­thing off the desk­top, so I keep the icons huge. Things get clut­tered quickly, so I end up drag­ging every­thing into folders.

The back­ground is from a T-Shirt design on thread​less.com called “Bad Reception” by Blair Sayer that I screwed around with. Notice I didn’t say improved.

Most of the Mac stuff is pretty basic - I didn’t spend all that money on a Mac to mess it up with a bunch of crap.

6 Responses to “My Boring Desktop”

1. I did not know that you ever dis­liked clut­ter. Be that as it may, you are not the first person I’ve heard say you like to keep your desk­top clear.

   Thank you for not being con­de­scend­ing to those who dis­agree or making out that an unclut­tered desk­top is some sort of virtue rather than a simple per­sonal pref­er­ence.

   But let me ask, “Why?” Do you keep your phys­i­cal desk­top clear, work­ing only on one thing at a time, putting it away before pulling out the the next work matter?

   When you are doing a home repair project do you set the screw­driver down next to you know­ing you’ll need it in ten min­utes or put it back in the tool­box before pick­ing up the hammer?

   Now admit­tedly I like to refer to my phys­i­cal desk­top as “The Landfill,” but I like to have every­thing I am going to use in plain sight or better yet run­ning in the back­ground. My pro­duc­tiv­ity over the years in a mul­ti­tude of jobs, tasks, etc. is extremely high. I credit part of that to my multi-​tasking and having every­thing needed imme­di­ately avail­able. One person’s “clutter” is another’s pre­ferred mode of work­ing.

   How do you orga­nize for a task at work? At home? With com­puter? With­out com­puter?

   Look­ing for­ward to learn­ing how you work.

   — skank September 12th, 2007 at 8:18 am #

2. First of all, it isn’t ALWAYS clean - I just keep it that way. The thing is that I use my desk­top as a sort of tem­po­rary hold­ing spot before cat­e­go­riz­ing or delet­ing things. All down­loads go to my desk­top, as does any­thing else I’m work­ing on at a given time. Macs make it so easy to get right to the desk­top (via Expose) that it’s simple to use it as a work­ing direc­tory. Once I’m done with a given task, every­thing gets put away. And with spring-​loaded fold­ers (SO much better than the Win­dows imple­men­ta­tion!) it’s easy to get every­thing sorted with drag and drop.

   You’ll also notice that I keep almost noth­ing in my Dock. For appli­ca­tion launch­ing, almost noth­ing beats Apple’s spot­light or the free­ware pro­gram Quick­sil­ver. A couple key­strokes and I can load any app or file from any direc­tory that I can name.

   I only run 4 or 5 apps at any given time - not because I can’t run more (RAM-​wise), but because that’s the most that I can use at one time with­out get­ting con­fused about what I’m doing. Besides brows­ing the web and read­ing email, my most common task is pro­gram­ming which takes up a tremen­dous amount of “mental RAM.” You have to load a con­struct of the pro­gram you’re devel­op­ing into your head in order to work on it, so you don’t want to be muck­ing around with too many dis­trac­tions while you do that. Scan­ning through dozens of icons at a time is a dis­trac­tion. Unnec­es­sary files are a dis­trac­tion. Having other apps up to CMD-​Tab through is a dis­trac­tion. Tend­ing to a music playlist is a dis­trac­tion. So I don’t do any of that stuff if I can help it.

   At work every­thing I use is sorted into a big group of Dreamweaver sites. All those files NEED to be with each other, so there’s no sense keep­ing them on my desk­top, and the place they need to be is usu­ally on some mapped drive that I couldn’t put on my desk if I wanted to. Because Win­dows makes it a pain to get back to your desk­top there’s no sense keep­ing any­thing there when you’re run­ning an app full screen. Win-D and Win-M are okay, but get­ting every­thing back to where you wanted it is painful. Win-D doesn’t always return you to the app you were just using, and Win-M just mur­ders your Alt-​Tab order (my pri­mary method of moving between apps).

   So my Win­dows desk­top is always com­pletely empty (I tell it to use active desk­top and then don’t run any active desk­top apps so that noth­ing will show up). But because of the lack of a good text-​based app launcher, I have a big Quick Launch bar stuffed with all the apps I need, and I have dozens of sites defined in Dreamweaver. I always open the apps I use in the same order (Out­look, Dreamweaver, Fire­fox, Explorer, etc.) to make it easier to get back to them if I’m using the mouse, which I don’t have to do in the Mac because I can just click on the Dock icon, and those stay in place.

   How do I work with­out the com­puter? I avoid work­ing with­out a com­puter. =-)

   — Jemaleddin September 12th, 2007 at 2:23 pm #

3. Very infor­ma­tive. The dif­fer­ent types of work we do lead to widely dif­fer­ent work­ing styles.

   When I want to get back to my desk­top quickly in Win­dows XP, I click on the Show Desk­top icon in the quick launch tool bar. It’s fast and couldn’t be any sim­pler.

   — skank September 12th, 2007 at 3:38 pm #

4. That does the same thing as Win-D, if I recall. But how do you get it back to the way it was after­ward? When I do that it screws up the lay­er­ing of win­dows which screws up the Alt-​Tab order.

   In Mac OS X you can define a corner of the screen that when you mouse over it all the win­dows fly apart to show the desk­top - mou­s­ing there again puts them back just the way they were. I have one corner that does that and once corner that tiles all win­dows so that with a flick of the wrist I can get to exactly what I need.

   — Jemaleddin September 12th, 2007 at 6:11 pm #

5. I’m not really wor­ried about the alt tab order. I couldn’t care less what order they are in. I have a large mon­i­tor and don’t run every­thing in full screen mode. I just click on the title bar of the window I want and bring it to the front. I haven’t used alt tab in years. Seems kind of point­less. When I had 14 inch mon­i­tor it was pretty handy–now? not so much. Alter­na­tively, I just click on the appli­ca­tion I want in the tool bar at the bottom of the screen.

   A lot of these dif­fer­ences are simply pref­er­ences for par­tic­u­lar ways of doing the same thing. What you describe sounds great, it just doesn’t strike me as any easier than what I am doing.

   — skank September 13th, 2007 at 6:53 am #

6. I think part of the dif­fer­ence is that I’m a touch typist. I’m guess­ing that I use my key­board much more than you do.

   I rarely click on my tabs in Fire­fox - I Ctrl-​Tab, Ctrl-​Shift-​Tab or Ctrl-# through them. In fact, I never use the close button - Ctrl-W for me. Years of work with graph­ics pack­ages mean that I keep my left hand on the key­board all of the time so that I can easily cut, copy, paste, undo or redo. And since find­ing small tar­gets with the mouse is slow, I prefer the way my Mac lets me use broad move­ments of the mouse to con­trol win­dows. (Mile-​high menus are good for that too.)

   And while these are per­sonal pref­er­ences, I find that most pro­gram­mers have a sim­i­lar rou­tine. Admit­tedly, most aren’t as anal about things as I am.

   — Jemaleddin September 13th, 2007 at 8:13 am #