How does the saying go? The wallpaper on the desktop in the first act must be changed by the third?
I’m a desktop fidgeter, I confess. Really good wallpaper lasts about a day, and finding a lovely new background is usually my first line of defense against getting any work done. Hell, I’ll change every icon in my Dock to deflect a particularly stubborn project. “If I create a perfect, pristine setup,” I tell myself, “I will produce perfect, pristine words.”
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
Instead, it’s come to this: the least distracting, least present settings I could achieve on my Mac, without sacrificing a certain aesthetic appeal. It resists fidgety change because I hardly know it’s there. It doesn’t make my writing any better. It just makes my writing possible.
In case there’s anyone else out there with my precise working tics, here’s a rundown of the current settings:
The Menubar
From left to right: that’s Tweetie, Skitch, SMCFanControl and FuzzyClock.
The Tweetie menubar icon will modestly shift to blue when I get new mentions or direct messages on Twitter. It makes a highlighted dock icon or a Growl notification look as audacious as a big-top ringmaster. I’ll get to it when I notice it, thankyewverymuch.
Skitch’s menubar icon serves a practical purpose: you can use it to snap a selection without changing window focus. This turns out to be important in the software-blogging part of my work.
SMCFanControl warns me when my MacBook looks like it might go all Mount Vesuvius on me, and lets me crank up the fans accordingly. I keep the icon there because I find it attractive, and because SMCFanControl offers no option to turn it off.
FuzzyClock: because you don’t actually need to know the time down to the minute, so you may as well stop being a self-important jerk about it.
You may notice some missing icons:
Volume: I already controlled it via keyboard 9 times out of 10, so I ditched the icon.
Airport: When I’m in-office, there’s no need to quickly change my wifi settings.
Bluetooth: Why?
Spotlight: I never use it. Instead, I use Quicksilver. Disabling the Spotlight icon takes a little more work than the previous three I’ve listed — which all have checkboxes in their respective preference panes — but you can get rid of it. Try this tip from MacOSXHints. (It’s labeled 10.4, but works on Leopard and Snow Leopard, too.)
The Desktop
No icons. Ever. If I must keep a “working” file somewhere, I use the Downloads folder. I know this is a personal quirk, but I subscribe to the “broken windows” theory where desktop icons are involved. Once you have a few, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to add a few more. Before you know it, your wallpaper has disappeared under piles of docs you probably don’t even need anymore. Clean up after yourself, or get Hazel to do it for you.
Speaking of wallpaper, I made some:
You can download mine, or make something similar through the magic of stealing a pretty photograph from Flickr and Gaussian blurring the heck out of it in Photoshop. I’ve found these blurry images distract me even less than a solid-colored background.
For the minimally-minded, Simple Desktops offers a great collection. I used The Depths, by my friend Keith Robinson, for quite a while.
Another design that stuck with me for more than a few days is Squarez, by Georg Rabensteiner. None of these are flashy, but that’s the point. I won’t change my wallpaper if I don’t notice it.
Although there are never icons on my desktop, I do use Bowtie. I listen to a lot of new music, and I like to be able to check song titles and assign star ratings at a glance. I don’t need the iTunes mini-controller open, because I play and pause using the keyboard (and anyway, iTunes is sort of ugly). Bowtie also works as a Last.fm scrobbler, if you’re into that sort of thing.
My Bowtie theme of choice is the unobtrusive, pared-down Zukunft. It stays in the corner of my second display, where I don’t see it unless I’m looking for it.
The Browser
The first thing I see when I open a new Safari window is Fav4.org. My Fav 4 sites are Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and WordPress. Not coincidentally, they’re also my biggest online distractions. I put them on my homepage because as soon as I start working and move to another page, they’re out of sight and out of mind.
My distractions aren’t in my bookmarks toolbar, either, because I don’t use one. Instead, I use Quix. You might say Quix is the Quicksilver of the browser world. It’s a bookmarklet that you can click on — or activate via hotkey, if you don’t show the bookmarks toolbar — to pop up a command prompt that does most everything you’d want a bookmarklet to do. If it doesn’t, you can extend Quix with your own easy-to-write commands.
Writing
This blog is written in Red Sweater Software’s MarsEdit (big ups to Daniel Jalkut!), with the very handy Live Preview window up on a second monitor.
When I blog about software, I type straight into Download Squad’s CMS, and keep Google Reader open (running in a Fluid-created site-specific browser) on the other monitor. I usually pop Reader to full-screen, and I simplify its appearance with the Mac OS X Snow Leopard theme. If that’s not your cup of tea, Helvetireader is also nice and clean. You’ll need Greasemonkey or Stylish in Firefox, and Greasekit in Safari. I believe Chrome supports these scripts now, as well.
For longer writing projects, including non-blog essays and that rumored novel, I use WriteRoom. It’s a lovely, bare-bones tool that allows me to write in full-screen mode without constantly fussing with fonts and formatting (as I am wont to do). Some folks also like Ommwriter, but I find it too gimmicky. (WriteRoom also has an iPhone version, but I’ll save my iPhone home screen for another time.)
Interviews are a special writing case. They get their own app, Transcriptions, which looks like someone took TextEdit, slapped an old version of QuickTime on the side, added hotkeys, and ran heavy voltage until the thing could walk. Despite its less-than-ideal appearance, it gets the job done.
In Conclusion
Just get as many settings out of your way as possible. It’s a lot easier than keeping flashy UI customization options in view all day and trying to resist playing with them through sheer willpower.
Oh, and hide the Dock. Trust me.
