Spread Out
I've been toying with this idea for a while, using a background that covers most of the look and filling in the rest with icons and text. Proportions are still off, but I think its coming along nicely.
Geektool is used to call the current day and Google Calendar (via gcalcli).
Icons are scattered throughout the desktop. The coffee cup in the upper-right hand corner is a shortcut to my hard drive, the MacMod sticky note is a shortcut to my MacMod articles in progress, the Polaroid-ish icons open other folders on my computer. I bet you wouldn't have noticed that the fingerprint on the Moleskine and the paperclip were icons if I hadn't pointed them out.
I made Adium use the same font that I set in the Moleskine and set it to have a transparent background.
Comments and faves
tziralis, dreamoo, senor diecast, Maybe Marco, and 36 other people added this photo to their favorites.
amyybeth (40 months ago | reply)
Ooo, very nice. :)
deskmodder (40 months ago | reply)
OMG wow! I love this kind of desktop form and function combined.
nicholasjon (40 months ago | reply)
Now that's a fantastic concept. It might be time to take another look at Geektool...
GretchenMary (40 months ago | reply)
This is really cool! Even to an unsavy, want-to-be tecky, like me!
senor diecast (40 months ago | reply)
i love it!
fabian17 (40 months ago | reply)
good!
inaudiblewhisper (40 months ago | reply)
Where can I find those icons?
adam whitlock (40 months ago | reply)
Thanks everyone!
@inaudiblewhisper
I actually made those icons from Google Image Searches & my personal photo library. If you want a program to make icons like this with ease, I'd suggest trying out Img2icns.
Byran. (40 months ago | reply)
@adam whitlock: I love it. It's stark in it's simplicity, and simply perfect. So... I'm stealing it :) I'll be using a little utility called Desktop Lyrics to show the lyrics of the current iTunes song on the Desktop in a handwriting font as I already do, and I've added the date (man, I've wanted to do that forever! Statoo sucked!) with GeekTool.
Two questions though: How did you get rid of the icon labels for the desktop icons, and how did you change the size of individual icons (if you did. I'm guessing they all might be 512x512, with the individual icons represented being smaller). You've really made the desktop look great, and be functional. Kudos.
TVaw (40 months ago | reply)
Would you mind sharing the coffee cup and moleskin? An amazing desktop!
Byran. (40 months ago | reply)
@TVaw: Google Images is your friend. Here's the ultimate result for the moleskin: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/M oleskine_rul...
Not sure about the coffee cup, though.
adam whitlock (40 months ago | reply)
@Bryan
Thanks for the props. As for the questions, I actually stuck with the 128px limit (knowing I could go larger). To make some of the icons smaller, I opted to make them from scratch to be smaller. They just have a lot of transparent background, which is not clickable. Only the actual drawn portion is clickable thanks to how OS 10 handles icon masking.
When I made aliases to different folders on my machine, I had issues with the little arrows showing up. I replaced that resource with a transparent .icns file to fix that issue. As for the actual labels, that was the easy part. I just made everything have names that were a lot of spaces. Cheap, sure, but I didn't feel like trying to find out if there was a com.apple.systempreference or something similar out there when I started this. I may dig deeper for the next desktop reiteration though.
Thanks again!
@TVaw
Bryan posted the Wikimedia link where I got the Moleskine picture that I made into part of my desktop. As for the coffee cup, I put it up on another service for you because Flickr doesn't really like PNG's with transparent backgrounds.
Brianna Dederich (40 months ago | reply)
Your desktop totally rocks!
thejoshuatree3 (36 months ago | reply)
link for wallpaper? Rocking setup man!
kdavies (34 months ago | reply)
I'm trying to hide the labels on my folders. You mention that you use a lot of spaces, but when I do that I get see ... as the label. Any other ideas on this?
Brant Winter (29 months ago | reply)
You don't still have that coffee cup icon by any chance ?? !!
DeadElephantRock (26 months ago | reply)
Great ideas.
lets.book (23 months ago | reply)
Really lovely :)
ann.L (19 months ago | reply)
When the photos are made into icons, how did you make the icon name disappear? I used Img2icns to make mine.
Also, how did you make the adium contacts list completely transparent? I can only change the opacity.
vibes35 (16 months ago | reply)
Excellent!! Love it... being new to Geek Tools what scripts did you use if you would not mind sharing?
Lovely work!!
cameraKase (9 months ago | reply)
i'am new to mac's .... very nice custom job ....