Daniel: Where the {triple explicative} is Cygwin on your laptop?
Totally unimportant person: Oh, I hide all my icons.
What do you mean, you hide all your icons?
I don’t like a messy computer.
You have a messy computer if you can’t find your icons.
No, I like to see the picture.
But if you can’t find the icons, you can’t DO anything.
I can do things, it just makes it harder…
For everybody else to do anything, yes.
Your computer screen is a mess. Look at all that stuff.
My document and application icons are strategically placed, organized by type and date. Your icons are crammed into one tiny double-arrow thing on the task bar.
Because I have a clean desktop.
If your child cleans his room by shoving everything she owns into his closet, did he just clean her room, or just move the mess so you can’t see it? Is that how you parent?
I’m telling the network people to kill your Sirius access.
my desktop is totally clean… I like it that way. and I can find what I need easily anyway
Lol, I prefer my desktop as empty as possible. All the programs I need the most are just two clicks away in the Start navigation and that’s exactly the way I like it. Full desktop? Now THAT’S a way to make the user confused.
Whatever happened to just sticking your icons into folders for similar items?
This might be handy for the Totally Unimportant Person:
http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/
Generally, I have so much stuff open that minimizing all of the windows to get to the desktop to find the shortcut to whatever I was looking for takes longer than looking at the Quick launch bar on the bottom of my left monitor and clicking what I need.
Having a clean desktop was something we did out of necessity in Windows 98 when the more crap you had there, the longer it took to boot the PC. It carried over. I now keep 3 icons on my desktop: My Computer, My Documents, and Recycle Bin. I also have shortcuts to My Computer and My Documents in the Start Menu and the Quick Launch bar.
Documents go in My Documents. Shortcuts to my most used programs go on the Quick Launch Bar. Shortcuts to the rest of the stuff I hardly ever use are in Start/All Programs/
Got Windows and want to see your desktop? Press the Windows Key + M, or Windows + D.
I like to keep a clean desktop, but I also like having quick access to stuff I’m working on. So the only things on my desktop are projects I’m currently working on, and as soon as they’re done they get filed away!
And I’m on a Mac, so I just use Spotlight to open whatever program I need, it’s fast and easy.
I have nothing on my desktop. I select “Hide Icons”. I have so much stuff open that minimizing to get at a file is a PITA. I use the Start menu and Launchy to get at what I want.
And this is why Macs will soon rule the world. F3 FTW!
Macs will rule the world, uh, yeah. Anyway, I have 12 icons on my desktop and that’s bordering on too many. And a very organized start menu…
I have no icons on my desktop.
In my Dock, however… hmm…
Left to right:
Finder, Safari, Mail, iTunes, DVD Player, Adium, Address Book, iCal, TextEdit, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, iPhoto, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Corel Painter, iWeb, Preview, iDVD, iMovie, Quicktime, Dictionary, System Preferences, Disk Utility, Solitaire XL, Stickies, Calculator, Bejeweled, Ventrilo, WoWMatrix, Curse Client, and World of Warcraft.
Anything I use more than once a week is on my Dock.
Kinda scary when I think about it…
No desktop icons, and only Firefox, Pidgin, Ventrilo, WoW, MouseMachine, Photoshop, iTunes, and Word on my launch bar.
Since Windows desktop searching has become fast and robust, I no longer organize by visual space, but rather by name. Documents go out into the cloud which is My Documents, and I get them back by searching for them.
It requires some mental naming conventions on my part, but it’s much faster and easier than my previous method of trying to folderize everything.
Clean Desktop FTW! I agree with Orion re the things that belong on your Dock.
A clean desktop is a sure sign of a clean, er… simple, er.. organized mind! Yeah, that it! And ORGANIZED mind! =)
Steve
Emerge Desktop + RocketDock.
I ran that way for about 9 months. Its effective, but doesn’t work well with dual screens . . . I think I had an app that would clear the screen momentarily the way Mac’s do (F9? forgot what its called) so I could see the status of my rotating backgrounds.
Then again, if you have tons of windows open, it can get messy too.
3 columns of icons on desktop for me. Fast & easy.
meh, use quicksilver. it will rock your world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)
“If your child cleans HIS room by shoving everything SHE owns into HIS closet, did HE just clean HER room, or just move the mess so you can’t see it?”
…Who typed this, Brain or Dan?
Win+R Cygwin
A few programs I had to setup to run like that for me.
Everything else is all in my start menu, organised properly. No two folders start with the same letter.
If i use it reguarly, I can type in the string to open the software faster than most people can go to desktop, find icon, and double click :>
That said, I’ve not had a mouse plugged into my main system for roughly four years now, Still not missing it
There are a lot of fun shortcuts you only seem to learn when you have a reason to. And even when you have a mouse, it’s so much quicker to type than to find stuff and click
No great loss – Cowherd sucks anyway. I’ve totally boycotted his show after he puled the DoS stunt on one of the sports blogs a while back…
Are you aware in the sentence,
‘If your child cleans his room by shoving everything she owns into his closet, did he just clean her room, or just move the mess so you can’t see it? Is that how you parent?’
Your child changed sex?
‘into his closet, did he just clean her room’ XD Other wise interesting post.
I just leave important icons on the desktop in neat places, the rest gets moved to a “sort” or “old desktop” folder.
The wonders of the compact omni-QuickLaunch-&-Taskbar of Windows 7 lets me get away with a row of 10 or so permanently sitting down there.
There are technically 4 columns of desktop shortcuts {post clearouts of non-essential extras like Windows Media Centre & iTunes to a little folder} and another column of the ‘sidebar’ gadgets, but Windows 7 has a similarly nifty trick allowing you to hide the whole lot of them and magic them back in when you choose.
(blushing) I also have a squeaky “clean” desktop.