I love Simple Desktops. You can guess what sort of web site it is.
Just simple desktop backgrounds. All of them are fantastic, and all of them look great on your Mac.
They’ve been collated by Tom Watson, who says the designs he features are for people who “want less, but not boring”. You can submit your own designs if you like.
And if these are too minimal for your taste, you might prefer to go hunting around the Command Shift 3 Flickr group where you’ll be sure to find plenty of inspiration and links to more frenzied desktop backgrouds. Personally, though, I’m sticking to the beautiful minimalism of Simple Desktops.
What it is: BumpTop for Mac is OS X software that gives you a whole new way of looking at and using your desktop, one that brings your computer screen into the realm of 3D imaging and instantly grows your monitor’s real estate – no matter how large or small – into a more productive palette than anything you’ve seen before.
Why it’s cool: BumpTop represents a total re-thinking of the 20 year-old design artifact that is the standard desktop UI.
Now you can view your computer screen as a real desk, or more accurately perhaps, as the floor of a four walled room – and use all the space to put your stuff in piles, tack important things on the walls and slap sticky notes on everything – just like in real life.
Desktop minimalists are hereby free to skip the rest of this post.
Earlier in the week we asked readers to post pics of their workspaces on our Facebook page for the chance to win a new Magic Mouse — and the response was great. So far, more than 90 of you have taken the time to become fans of Cult of Mac on Facebook, snap a shot and upload your pictures — thank you!
While everyone is waiting with bated breath to find out who’ll win the Magic Mouse (announcement to come tomorrow, Sunday, November 1), we thought readers might like to see a cool dozen of some of the most interesting.
Let us know what you think in comments below and feel free to continue posting your own shots over at the Facebook fan page.
It’s been said countless times: one indicator of Apple’s superiority over Microsoft and Dell (and other major computer and electronics manufacturers that are — for the most part — associated with Windows) is the fact that Apple inspires creativity in the general populace on a scale that dwarfs the influence of any other computer-oriented company you’d care to name.
Some evidence of this can be found in the following gallery of 10 simply awesome wallpapers themed around nothing more complicated than the Apple logo. Perhaps you know others in this specific genre that belong in this class — we invite you to let us know about it in comments below.
And if you can find anything comparable out there built around a logo from Microsoft, Windows, Dell, HP, etc., do let us know about that, too.
The Cult team members are not famous for colorful desktops, but when I saw this little beauty I felt it deserved some link love. This gorgeous desktop picture (and its slightly spikier sibling) are now available for free from the generous hands of Wolfgang Bartelme, having recently made something of a splash of their own on Flickr.
Wolfgang is no stranger to design gorgeousness, having also created other desktop and iPhone wallpapers like Dashball, ColorFlow, and ColorFlow 2.
Norwegian Mac support company Teknograd likes to have fun with its advertising campaigns, and this latest one is the cleverest idea yet.
In recent years they’ve had a series of ads showing a Mac desktop where the Hard Disk is under attack from a mass of files and folders. But for this year’s campaign, they wanted something new that made use of the default Leopard desktop wallpaper.
The result is these TIE fighters, created by advertising agency TBWA. I asked them how they did it – surely not with real icons on a real desktop? No.
“We have photoshopped this, in almost 400 layers, but each folder is named individually, so it was a hell of a lot work. Martin Holm, the illustrator and art director, just passed out when we asked him how long time it took,” they told me.
Last week we wrote about a kind of silly competition going on out there in Mac land between people vying for the title for running the most apps simultaneously on a Mac.
Comes now, Cult reader Jay Pan, who figures all the buzz about people running OS X on hacked netbooks should entitle him to some consideration for managing to get 80 apps going with OS X running on an Advent 4211 ( MSI Wind Clone ), with both Blender and Daz3D launched.
“I’ve been trying to determine Atom’s performances with Mac OS X for some time now, and I think this shows Atom’s netbooks are not so crippled!” he told us.
So what do you think? Is Pan’s record in the same league with the 240 apps running on a Mac Pro 8 core machine? Should the judges create a special “netbook” category for the dubious “Busy Mac” honor?
Follow after the jump for Pan’s hardware specs and list of apps running, and be sure to click on the image above for a larger view.
Over at Reddit, some of the Redditors have been enjoying a little friendly desktop sharing over the past day or so. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your own desktop arrangement, there’s plenty to be found here.
Seeing all these desktops got me thinking: what are the desktops of the Cult team like? And how about our lovely Cult readers?
At the top of this post you can see my desktop, and “minimal” doesn’t really do it justice. My desktop is always kept clean and clear, devoid of decoration and deprived of a Dock. But that’s just me, and I’m a bit weird. How about my fellow Cultists?
Cult reader James moves to the head of the pack in the incredible contest to see how many apps can be running on your Mac and displayed on your desktop in all their juicy, chaotic goodness by Exposé.
James’ machine is Mac Pro 8 core, with 10GB RAM, 30’ NEC 3090 monitor, and 2 1TB Samsung drives raided together. He has a lot of high end apps running, including all of Final Cut Studio, all of Adobe Creative Suite CS 3 Design Premium, all of Office 2008, all of iWork 08, Google Earth, Windows XP and Crunch Bang Linux in virtual box , Sling Player, Filemaker xcode and mmaannyyy more.
“I got to the point where it started giving an error code and would not launch any more apps,” he told us. “When I tried to screen shot it refused, so I had to quit an app before I could make a screen shot.”
Click on the image to see the original size and find he’s also got Open Office, Think Free Office, Eclipse IDE, a 22 mega pixel image from a Canon 5K Mark II (the ship), Proxi, Sketch Up, Sketch Book education, Skype, Gizmo, Gridiron Flow beta, eBay desktop, Acquisition, Adium, Firefox, Safari, iPhone Simulator…
He thinks there are about 240 apps running in all, but says, “I reckon the Pro could take another 100 if the OS would allow it — maybe snow leopard.”
Follow afer the jump for screen shots of James’ Activity Monitor.
