The MacDeskBlog

I am at a loss for words.

Submissions are temporarily re-opened for anyone caring to share a tribute. I will process them as quickly as I can. submissions at macdesktops.com

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do…. “

As of October 1st, the home page now includes a vertical tasting of all of the pictures posted on the current day across all years. New pictures will continue to go up through the 15th. I hope this helps you rediscover pictures from the archive.

Well folks, it is time for me to declare victory and move on.

When I started MacDesktops in April of 1998, Apple Computer was going out of business for 10 years if you believed the pundits and analysts. Today, Apple Inc is the highest valued technology company in the world (maybe the highest valued US company period depending up the time and day). In 1998, Mac users were an oppressed minority, struggling to keep our toe holds at work. Today, Mac users are not questioned about our choice of platform. In 1998, Mac users had to go to Mac news web sites to find out about new products. Today, Apple Inc gets weeks of headlines in every major newspaper leading into and trailing out of each announcement. Authors mention Apple in articles just to get page views. In 1998, Apple Computer (re)hired Chiat-Day as their advertising agency. C-D brought us the Think Different campaign, the early iMac campaigns, and the first iPod campaigns. Their messages were heartening, cute and frequently funny. Their ads made for great desktop pictures. Today, I have no idea who makes Apple’s ads. They’re simple and elegant, but ultimately boring.

For the first decade, I was excited to be providing this service. For the past couple of years, I’ve been phoning it in. Submissions have dropped off precipitously over the past two years. I lost my statistics server for the site at least 5 years ago and never replaced it, so I don’t even know how many of you still visit. I expect that you number several thousand now compared to hundreds of thousands back around the turn of the century.

So, I am ceasing updates to MacDesktops. I plowed through the backlog and filled the queue through October 15th.

MacDesktops will remain up as an archive, with the homepage showing a vertical tasting of pictures over the years from the current day.

I hope you enjoy these final installments.

You may have noticed that I added 2560×1440 resolutions for 27″ iMacs recently. I noticed a bug in one of my Photoshop scripts today which messed up that resolution for some pictures. I just recreated and replaced the defective files. By default, new resolutions are turned on for everybody. If you don’t need this new resolution and don’t want it displayed, you can turn it off in your Preferences.

Are resolutions missing that you want? If so, let me know with a comment below or an email to feedback.

I should have asked this question years ago, but I’ve always just kind of winged it in the past. I bring it up because I’m processing some November pictures and discovered two original artwork submissions for Halloween. One the one hand, I like to have a Halloween picture up on the site on Halloween (fireworks on 4th of July, etc), but on the other hand, that pretty much limits enjoyment of the picture as a desktop to a single day.

So, I ask you, how early should I post holiday pictures?
a) day of
b) day before
c) up to a week before
d) more than a week before

Feel free to vary your answers by holiday. And honestly, the holidays for which I typically get submissions are only Valentine’s Day, Independence Day, Halloween, and Christmas, though submissions are always welcome for other commemorations.

As a corollary, do you enjoy Fall landscapes during the Spring or Summer? How much should I try to post seasonal pictures within their seasons?

And if you’re paying attention, yes, this does mean that posting of some pictures gets delayed by a full year (or even two back when submissions were heavy) in order to hit their holiday.

I’ve been sitting on some news for a while and I think it’s time to share it. I was notified last month that I’m being laid off from my regular job of the past 16 years. As strange as it may sound, this turns out to be a good thing. My wife and I have been planning for life post-career for quite some time now. Though we’re short of our targets, we’ve decided that we are going to execute on our plans. We are moving out of the country early next month. Once there, I’ll share more details.

Don’t panic.
I will continue to run MacDesktops from our new home, and there will be no break in service during out transition. I am still struggling with the last pieces of the mail server transition, but I’m going to tackle that today (Wednesday) and hope for the best.

I’m sure that you’ve noticed that despite my call for submissions a few months ago, the site has subsisted on pictures from Frank J Sinkavich, Stan Peyton, Timothy M. Urbanek, Victor Hamberlin, NASA, and me since then. Please join me in thanking Frank, Stan, Timothy and Victor for their tremendous contributions to the site. I have been accumulating new submissions during these months. Once we get settled, I’ll increase postings with those new submissions. So please, keep sending them in.

Thank you for your support,
Ryan

Hey everyone,

I’m running quite low on submissions these days. I’m starting to think that MacDesktops may be running down. I am flush with pictures from a few dedicated photographers, but submissions in general are way down. Some of this I blame on Apple’s success. As Macs have become cool once again, and once Apple lost the label of “going out of business for 20 years,” the need for reaffirmation on our computer screens has diminished. Some of the blame I’ll also lay on Apple’s relatively weak print ads over the past few years. The Think Different campaign, the early iMac campaigns, and the late PowerMac/PowerBook campaigns all had a variety of catchy and quirky slogans in them. The stuff is mostly simple marketing speak. But mostly, it falls back on me. I haven’t worked on promoting the site for several years. That’s one of the side effects of keeping the site free with minimal advertising.

So, it looks like I’ll be curbing back to only one new picture on some days, probably starting this week. I’ll post two at time when I can and I will ramp back up to two each day if submissions rise again. I’ll continue to post anime on Mondays and NASA/ESA pictures on Saturdays, and I’ll continue to try to post one Apple picture on Tuesdays or Thursdays (always with a preference toward submitted ones over something I come up with myself).

Thank you to everyone who has been coming for so long, and to those of you finding MacDesktops for the first time.

Ryan

Hey folks. Sorry for the delay on today’s second picture. As I was filling in the gap last night, I found that my mail/etc server at home was having some trouble. As I spent several hours fixing it, I didn’t pay enough attention to my posting and put the snakes up on the wrong day. The server is now working much better, and I fixed the posting date for the snakes. The biggest impact was that the announcements went out several hours late, and I had to send them twice to capture the late posting.

By the way, the submission queue is very short these days. If you would like to share any of your artwork, photographs, humor, or whatnot, please send them in.

Thanks to M. Breez for pointing out a bug in the site. The main page and using the “images from previous week” links should now display seven days of images every time. It was limited to the most recent 14 images which trimmed off an image for 15 picture weeks and displayed less than half of the images for those crazy 30 image weeks back in 2000 (April 5th if that relative link doesn’t jump you back far enough). And if you’re browsing back really far through the archives, you shouldn’t ever receive the same results for previous week searches. You may wonder how that could have happened, so I’ll tell you. If the “images from previous week” search finds no pictures, it checks the prior week for up to 28 days in total. The link was only changing by 7 days even if the search went back 14, 21 or 28 days. So, you could get the same results up to four consecutive times. Now, if the search goes back 28 days, the link will go back 28 days too.

Please let me know if think you find a new bug in this.

Ryan

This morning’s announcement missed one of today’s pictures. I suspect the database backup may have been running at the time, but I’m not certain. The unannounced picture has been up all day. I re-ran the announcements after I got home from work.