Following the meme stream, not least because there’s method to my desktop that I’d like to explain. It’s trendy to have minimalist, empty desktops. It’s beautiful to do so, for sure. But the Desktop probably my most actively used tool of the OSX UI, a vital, busy bridge between tasks and apps. Here’s now:

Top right are disc drives, of course. If yours are aligned to the top left, you should contact customer support and report a fault with your Operating System. I don’t use File Vault, so ‘Home’ and ‘Y’ and encrypted sparseimages (created through Disk Utility; Stuart Colville did a thorough write-up of the process). This lets me selectively encrypt important files, without the performance overhead of encrypting the entire home directory, and allows me to use separate encryption phrases for personal and work data; different from my login password, too.

Then there’s a gap, because I fucking hate it when I mount a DMG or USB key and it sticks an icon in the second or third column. Kinda wish the OSX desktop had columns in its grid implementation to handle this for me.

Moving left, two Taskpaper documents; again split into work and personal. I don’t get along with more complex GTD apps, and whilst I should move these onto a wiki for access-anywhere benefits, I just love the simple Taskpaper interface and shortcuts too much. Wish it had an online mode.

Then there are some active side-project directories, and a link to my Yahoo! Scratchpad, where random contributions go. I don’t know if the other teams really want my critique and OmniGraffle reworkings of their secret project’s UI, but whatever, I lament about my wasted creativity too much not to. Then there’s my green card application, a text snippet to create a new database and user in MySQL (which needs converting into a script), and then various in-progress documents for projects, some of which will definitely never get built.

The middle is basically ‘to do’. Photos and screengrabs to upload or process, usually for this blog, and a couple of temporary files that I’m working with right now.

Top left are more random snippets of text that amuse me, a long number… it’s probably very important but I forget what it’s for. Best not delete it. Text Snippets, by the way, are the feature of OSX when you drag selected text onto the Desktop. You can then view it, and doing ⌘C copies the raw text right back to the clipboard for pasting. Very handy.

There’s also ‘Accessibility.text’ (I stopped using ‘.txt’ as an extension when I discovered that three-letter file extensions were just a legacy Windows limitation). This contains four bullet points: “Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust”. It’s the four principals of web accessibility (as taught to me by Mike Davies). They’re important.

The Dock is full of minimised Safari windows; I use minimised windows as another kind of deferred to-do list.

• Wallpaper is Aurora Borealis by Kano89
• Disc icons are from the Agua sets.