October 03, 2006
Mac OS background madness
I like simple, uncluttered desktops, and I realized a long time ago that I was among a very small group of users for doing so. Most of the computer background desktops that I see are usually filled with documents, links and programs to a point that I wonder how these users ever find what they're looking for.
Well, I'm sure they find their documents eventually, but do they really visually search through the rows of 10x10 icons on their desktop to do so, or do they rely on the Explorer or Google Desktop for this? On top of this, most users typically have the picture of a sunset, a waterfall or their sons playing soccer, further degrading the readability of whatever text they used to name their documents.
If you have more than twenty icons on your desktop, I am betting that you are only clicking on four or five of them regularly.
For all these reasons, I like to keep my desktop relatively uncluttered. All the programs are neatly gathered in the Quick Launch bar and the few icons that you can see on my background are usually temporary files that I need to refer to either a lot, or just for the current week.
With that in mind, I recently set out to modify my Mac Book Pro desktop in order to show my favorite background: solid black. And I mean black as in 0x000000, which is the only background color that allows me to identify icons and texts without any impediments.
So I right-clicked on the background, selected "Change Desktop Background..." and I was presented with a dialog box offering me various options, among which "Solid colors", which I promptly selected. The dialog shown above appears, and here is my first surprise: it looks like I have a choice of ten preset backgrounds, but solid black is not one of them. "No problems", I think, I'll just find the color chooser and I'll set the color myself.
Problem is... there is no such thing.
That's right: no color chooser.
Mac OS X won't let you set your background to an arbitrary solid color: you have to choose one that Apple decided for you. And by the way, did you notice the dotted rectangle above? It represents a solid white background. The trouble is... this dotted line is not shown in reality (it was added manually to this picture). The background is there for you to select, but it's completely invisible because shown as white on white. How silly is that?
Anyway, back to my problem.
I can't select my own background color. That's pretty retarded. You know, I can almost imagine what went on in the meeting room when this decision was made:
Steve Jobs: "Okay, I want the following ten choices for background colors: dark gray, solid aqua blue, ...."
UI designer: "Great, we'll give the user a quick way to select the colors that work best with our Aqua theme. Where shall we put the color chooser?"
"There shall be no color chooser."
"Sir?"
"There shall be no color chooser."
"But... What if they don't like any of these preset colors?"
"I don't care. The Mac OS desktop is the quintessence of beauty. I don't want any of our tasteless users to ruin it with their own crappy colors."
<uncomfortable silence, then forced grin> "Ah... good one sir... Very funny. Now, seriously...?"
"I was being serious."
So you can't choose your own background color on Mac OS. That's the way it is. Of course, there are workarounds, such as creating a 1x1 image and use it as a tiled background as explained here, but if I hear one more time that Mac OS is the most advanced desktop currently, I'll simply challenge the zealot to set the background color of their desktop to solid magenta and watch her suffer in agony while I enjoy my black Windows desktop which took me all of three seconds to configure.
Posted by cedric at October 3, 2006 09:54 AM
There's a related bit in this story about Classic:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt
"Bill complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. But I thought that users should be free to do as they pleased, since it was their desktop, and it was easy to revert to one of the built-in patterns. Bill cared most about MacPaint, and didn't want a potentially ugly desktop pattern marring his creation. So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint."
Posted by: Chris Nokleberg at October 3, 2006 10:46 AMPlease stop. I'm beginning to dislike my MacBook Pro
I noticed it too and thought that I was missing a dialog somewhere.
I'm really curious what the idea behind this is. Perhaps the colourchooser was too difficult
Posted by: Ronald at October 3, 2006 01:25 PMYou can add your own ones; basically, they're just images too. Look in /Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors/*.png -- they are all the 'images' which are actually shown in the Solid Colors list. And if you look at each of them, they're actually a 128x128 (@72dpi) PNG.
So your idea of using the image as a tiled background is pretty much spot on to the way that the preference pane is implemented.
Alex.
Posted by: Alex Blewitt at October 3, 2006 02:41 PMThats a pretty crappy way of implementing solid color backgrounds.
Posted by: Nathan at October 3, 2006 09:01 PMNathan why do you think anyone cares anout your opinion?
Posted by: joe at October 3, 2006 09:09 PMWhy would nobody care about Nathan's opinion?
I too think that it's a lousy way to implement solid colors.
There *is* a color chooser though. Choose an image, then choose "Center" instead of "Stretch", and you can choose the color that surrounds it. So make a very small solid image (maybe 1x1?) and then surround it with a color of your choice.
Since I agree with your use of uncluttered desktop, i can't help thinking about my very own desktop, using as background the excellent osxplanet.
Of course, it puts a big Earth at the center of my desktop, but at this position, there is never any icon and this Earth is only seeable when using Expose.
> So make a very small solid image (maybe 1×1?)
> and then surround it with a color of your choice.
If these are PNGs, transparency may well be supported, in which case you don’t even need that one pixel of dirt in the center of your desktop.
Posted by: Aristotle Pagaltzis at October 4, 2006 01:58 AMYou spoiled little brat.
Ok you win, this isnt the most advanced desktop because you cant have a black background. Who can argue against such ironclad logic.
Posted by: Juan Pereira at October 4, 2006 07:34 AMYou spoiled little brat.
Ok you win, this isnt the most advanced desktop because you cant have a black background. Who can argue against such ironclad logic?
Posted by: Juan Pereira at October 4, 2006 07:35 AMYou have become such a whiner lately. I think that it is time for a vacation! Talking about cool features, have you ever tried to list the icons you hhave on your desktop as a list with the icon in 12x12 on the left of the file name? Try doing this with the crappy windows XP.
Posted by: Edwin Khodabakchian at October 4, 2006 09:16 PMNow Edwin, no name calling.
Posted by: Roger at October 5, 2006 05:55 PMEdwin, C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserNamehere\Desktop
But what for?
Posted by: Oleg at October 6, 2006 03:14 AMIf you must be subjected to graphics or colors I'd reccomend going to http://www.deviantart.com/ and browsing under the "minimalistic" backgrounds category. You may find something there more to your liking.
Posted by: Jesse Kuhnert at October 7, 2006 09:15 AM> You have become such a whiner lately. I think that it is time for a vacation! Talking about cool features, have you ever tried to list the icons you hhave on your desktop as a list with the icon in 12x12 on the left of the file name? Try doing this with the crappy windows XP.
Open Explorer, select the address bar, type "%HOME%\Desktop", return, right-click on the right pane, Display -> List.
Done.
Thanks for playing though, I guess.
PS: the icon may not be 12*12, I don't have any idea of Windows' "small icons" size, but I guess that part wasn't the point of your post
Posted by: Masklinn at October 8, 2006 02:26 PMHey Cedric,
I'm from a minority even smaller than yours: not only do I think that non-solid background hurt the eyes (and waste resources), but I do also think icons are an anti-pattern. My (X Window System) desktop has no icons on the desktop. Mostly everything is done from the command-line (the mouse is an anti-pattern too, a waste of time, besides for artists that need to do editing on pictures/videos etc.). I do have the equivalent of the "taskbar", which is more of a quick way to see the virtual desktops/apps than a way to launch apps (arguably it helps the girlfriend launch Firefox). Not only are icons an anti-pattern, they're a memory hog and a performance hog. No icons on my desktop for me, thanks :)
And, of course, a solid-color background (kind of a dark blue, not disimilar to one of the solid color background that Windows proposes by default, which, if I'm not mistaken, was chosen after usability studies).
"Your system is cute, but it looks like you need to move your hands away from the keyboard" (paraphrased).
:)
Posted by: Anonymous Coward at October 9, 2006 05:40 AMBut the pretty drop shadows won't show up on black! I switched from black to dark grey for OS X and Win XP for that reason. Otherwise all those rendering cycles will be wasted drawing black on black. My XP machines run with the desktop folder disabled - though Windows still insists on telling you periodically that you have unused icons on your disabled desktop.
Posted by: Pete Kirkham at October 9, 2006 08:56 AMBut the pretty drop shadows won't show up on black! I switched from black to dark grey for OS X and Win XP for that reason. Otherwise all those rendering cycles will be wasted drawing black on black. My XP machines run with the desktop folder disabled - though Windows still insists on telling you periodically that you have unused icons on your disabled desktop.
Posted by: Pete Kirkham at October 9, 2006 08:56 AMI meant getting a listing directly on the desktop not in the explorer. If you try the listing directly on the desktop, you will see that it is actactually a great management of space.
Posted by: Edwin Khodabakchian at October 9, 2006 11:48 PMhi, :) that's so funny.
Posted by: me at October 17, 2006 05:24 PM"I meant getting a listing directly on the desktop not in the explorer." Sorry I'm not won over.
"Mostly everything is done from the command-line (the mouse is an anti-pattern too, a waste of time, besides for artists that need to do editing on pictures/videos etc.)" What's wrong with you people? Why don't you try playing Millipede effectively with a keyboard. Try browsing Amazon using only the tab keys and cursor keys: it is a time waste. Heck why not use a text-based browser since graphics itself requires your computer to "waste" cpu power. What's the difference between command aliases and icons? Nothing except you can just double-click on an icon instead of typing the alias in and icons take up some visible space.
Posted by: angry at October 26, 2006 06:35 AMeasy way to pick the desktop color of your choose, is navigate to /Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors, you'll see the preset colors. Choose one color you'll never use, drag it into Photoshop, pick your desired color, fill in your little png file with this new color and click on save. you should then find you have a solid color of your choose in the desktop menu.
Posted by: dude at December 5, 2006 01:20 AMHey Cedric, thanks for the rant.
Your rant was a goad for me to fix an annoying problem. And your tiling of a solid color was a "good enough" solution. I am back to a grey of my choosing as a desktop.
Solo