And now for something completely different.

I’ve always enjoyed screen savers. They outlived their original purpose of preventing phosphor burn-in long ago, but they’re art, and art…don’t need no reason….

My favorite, Dream Aquarium, is being ported to OS X, but it’s not ready yet. While waiting for it, I’m enjoying Electric Sheep, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Electric Sheep is a free, open-source screen saver; it runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The concept behind Electric Sheep is very interesting, using distributed processing to create amazing morphing fractal animations called “sheep”.

The sheep are beautiful and mesmerizing. You can vote on a sheep using the up and down arrows on the keyboard for ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, respectively. Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, producing a pleasing flock via natural selection.

Now tell me that’s not cool.

A couple of hints:

• It can take a few days for sheep to start appearing on your machine naturally, so it’s recommended to obtain a starter flock via one or more sheep packs.
• Electric Sheep can automatically play an iTunes playlist; I’ve found the dreamy soundtracks produced by pzizz to be very appropriate.

If all Electric Sheep did was display incredible fractal animations, it’d be one of the best screen savers available. Understanding what it really does is to say the least, impressive.

Baa….

 

Our old PC had 1GB of memory. That’s about one-half of what 32-bit XP can use, but it was still tight, especially with multiple users and fast user switching. Often it was preferable just to log the other user off when switching.

Our new Mac Pro has 4GB, and will address a great deal more if necessary. As it happens, 4GB is very generous for our needs; the fast user switching experience under OS X is actually usable.

Really, there’s so much memory available that one never needs to close anything. This is nice, but cluttered, and I’m easily distracted when confronted with visual clutter. For this reason, I’d often use the maximize window function under Windows; there’d then be nothing else blinking at me while I was attempting to work on something.

Sensei Patrick chides me for this as DOS thinking, but I have to go with what works.

OS X does offer a zoom function, but it doesn’t work in the same way that maximize works under Windows; the differences between the UI approaches and the rationales behind them are described well at the XvsXP site.

Well, if zoom isn’t our solution to reduce visual clutter, then perhaps we can minimize the windows we’re not using.

OS X has a minimize function just as Windows does; the window does a spiffy Genie effect and descends to the dock. Nice, but it makes the dock larger, and now there’s a redundant icon in it. This reminds me of the Windows task bar, which I always had to expand to multiple rows in order to contain everything in a readable manner. Surely we can do better than this.

And we can. OS X does offer something different; showing and hiding of applications. Contained in the application menu of any running application are the entries ‘Hide’, ‘Hide Others’, and ‘Show All’. These commands are ideal when dealing with clutter. A hidden application’s windows simply vanish; the running application is still available via the dock icon or command-tab, and reactivating via these methods will restore it from the hidden state.

Perfect for our needs. To focus on a single application, just doing a ‘Hide Others’ will declutter the desktop. However, being of an obsessive nature, we can still improve on this, and some applications, for example MacJournal, do so via use of a fullscreen entry mode. This is a nice approach for something like pure text editing, but the paradigm doesn’t really work all that well elsewhere.

There’s a great discussion of this very issue on 43 Folders, including an informative video podcast. In the podcast, several utilities to assist in elimination of distraction are demonstrated; among them are Backdrop, MenuShade, and Spirited Away. These applications are freeware, and their use is demonstrated in the podcast.

These three applications do what they do well, but I’d prefer a single application to take care of it all.

There is such an application, Desktopple Pro.

Desktopple Pro combines the functions of the three freeware utilities into a single preference pane and menu bar icon. It’s rich with features, but for purposes of decluttering, the following two are just killer:

• Firstly, it monitors the activity state of non-foreground windows. When they’ve been unused for a configurable time period, they’re automatically hidden. It’s like having someone clean up after you; the developer terms this ‘Window Cleaning’. Quite nice.
• Secondly, by choosing a menu option or by using a hotkey, desktop icons are hidden, the wallpaper is smoothly replaced with something basic (I use black), and the menu bar fades into the background; hovering over the menu bar will restore it. There’s now zero visual distraction; only the application is visible.

It’s all very crisp, polished, and highly configurable; it’s evident that a great deal of care has gone into development.

Desktopple Pro is $17 USD shareware, with a 15-day unrestricted trial.

 

The new Mac came with a number of desktop backgrounds. They’re nicely done and have the advantage of not being distracting, but they lack a certain cool factor. We can, however, address this.

Mando Gomez runs Mandolux, where he provides his work for noncommercial use as desktop wallpaper.

Mando’s work is beautiful, and quite eclectic; I’d think anyone could find something suitable in his archives. I use his Zen/Lantern as my desktop background.

Images are available in a size perfect for the native resolution of even the largest monitors, and for those with multiple-monitor setups, left/right and even triptych images are provided.

It’s a lot of fun just to browse through his archives; he’s very talented.

Mando does accept donations.

 

Flip4Mac handles WMV files, and Perian handles nearly everything else.

The final player in the codec triad is A52Codec, an A52/AC-3 audio component. AC-3 is quite a common format on DVDs, so it’s nice to be able to handle it.

A52Codec is free and open-source.