A Window That Opens Inward

Someone tagged me in a chain thing—share your desktop publicly. Normally I’d wave it off but there’s something oddly exposing about the request that made me pay attention. A photo of your physical desk tells someone one thing. Your desktop tells them something else.

Mine at the time: Adium on the left because I’m always half mid-conversation with someone. Finder in the centre looking purposeful but mostly just existing. iTunes in the top right, which is where iTunes lives in my life in general—background noise, constant presence. The Dock running along the bottom with the programs I keep returning to. A wallpaper from Pixel Girl, which has been serving the aesthetically-inclined Mac user community for years.

There’s something I’ve always appreciated about the Mac desktop as a genre. The dock, the menu bar, the sparse window arrangement—it at least pretends to have its life together, which is more than you could say for most Windows setups at the time, icons colonizing the entire screen, taskbars packed with ghosts of software installed once in 2003 and never touched again.

An Apple holiday ad was making the rounds that week that captured some of that feeling. Sometimes the company that makes your tools produces something that makes you feel briefly, embarrassingly fond of them. The chain continues, for anyone who feels like exposing themselves.