The MacDeskBlog

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.

MacDesktops is 10 years old today. In 1998, I bought a new 20″ monitor. It was huge. It had a massive 1280×1024 resolution. I searched the web high and low for desktop pictures to fit it, but nobody provided pictures that huge. So, I generated a few desktops and shared them. I was pleasantly surprised that the site generated a couple thousand hits that month, and a few more in May. By June though, interest was trailing off. So, I decided to start posting new pictures weekly. Eventually, weekly became daily. MacDesktops joined MacNN for a couple of years. MacNN’s servers crashed and MacDesktops went offline for a few months. I unhitched from MacNN and relaunched the site independently where it has stayed ever since and weathered two more extended downtimes due to server outages.

In 1998, you’ll notice several Power Computing desktops, as Apple was ending its clone phase. Apple was fighting for survival with market share dwindling below 3%. MacDesktops’ pro-Mac pictures helped bolster the confidence of Mac users under siege. Apple’s combative advertising compared Intel processors to snails and lit the Intel “Bunny Suits” on fire. Apple encouraged everyone to Think Different by buying a Mac. Then came the iPod and iMac, each of which increased Apple’s standing and decreased pressure on Mac users everywhere. Apple had some great advertising campaigns when they returned to Chiat-Day, and they have produced some terrific products since 1998. When the two have converged, MacDesktops has benefitted from the excitement and buzz with tremendous submissions of Apple product desktops.

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses and I took a subtle stance here. This pissed off some people and encouraged others. When I posted Movie picture #146, I pissed off some more people. Such is life. I put a lot of effort into building this little soap box and there are times when I must stand on it and speak rationally to whomever will pause and listen.

During these past ten years, my own interest in the site has waxed and waned several times. Sometimes generating and posting pictures is a joy. At other times, it is a burden. I felt bad for contributors when the submission queue was 8-12 months long. And I feel worried now when it is less than 2 months. I rely more and more upon consistent contributors to fill up the queue when I would like to provide a wider variety of content. My huge 1280×1024 monitor from 1998 is now tiny. Creating original artwork for 30″ Cinema Displays takes more effort than making something for a 15″ monitor. In 1998, digital cameras were expensive while capturing low resolution images. Today, most of the desktops come from inexpensive, high resolution digital cameras.

How has your Mac experience changed over these past ten years?

By request, I upgraded Television, and University and College Campuses from searchable keywords to categories. Of course, the real intent of the request was for more submissions in those categories, as well as more Family Guy, more Cars/Autos, more Logos, more Music, more Humor, and more Multiple Monitor Sets.

Be general. Be specific. Be public. Reply in the blog with your requests. Perhaps you will inspire someone to send in your heart’s desire.

The picture queue is down to two months now. That may sound like a lot, but it’s really quite small. Please keep sending in your beautiful compositions. Photographs are great, and original artwork, product compositions, portraits, movie, animation (all of those non-Flora, non-Landscape categories) are even better. If you send in something which will be less poignant in two months, please remember to add “Time Sensitive” to the subject line.

Sorry folks. It has been a crazy week, and I fell behind a bit this week. My wife had her ACL reconstructed last Friday. Her recovery is going extremely well. I’ve been home all week to help her, which includes trips to the doctor, trips to the pharmacy, trips to the DMV, i.e. driving around. And I did manage to get over to MacWorld for about two hours yesterday evening. In hindsight, I should have been one of those hours putting up pictures for today and this weekend, but it slipped my mind. Plus, I’m still working full time, albeit from home. Anyway, I’m not complaining. This has been a very fulfilling week in which generating and posting pictures required more time and effort than I was about to allocate. My little stumble with Chris Bassett’s picture on Tuesday was a precursor to today’s gap in service.

I will try to catch up (which means get ahead) tonight and over the weekend. I could use some help in the form of some MacBook Air, Time Capsule, iPod Touch, iPhone, Mac Pro, and Apple Logo submissions. High resolution product photos are provided by Apple PR. I didn’t get any good pictures from the show yesterday, but if you got something desktop-worthy, please send it in. Remember to add “Time Sensitive” to the subject line of your product and MacWorld desktops.

Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard is just around the corner. As a couple of people have pointed out to me, Leopard sports a translucent menu bar. This means that you will be able see not only your desktop picture behind your menus, but also the credit tags which appear at the top of every picture from MacDesktops.

I have not yet seen Leopard in action as I fell out of the ADC program a few years ago and haven’t pestered my connected friends for a copy. With that caveat, I will say that I am taking it on faith that Apple has implemented this feature in a way which will not render this entire archive useless. Looking at the screenshots on Apple’s site does not lead me to any conclusion. It could be a close call.

I think that one of three scenarios is likely. The first scenario is that the translucency will be mild enough, i.e. will obscure the background image well enough, that the text tag behind the text menus will not be overly distracting. The second scenario is that we will be able to adjust the translucency via the Terminal using ‘Defaults Write <yadda yadda yadda>’. The third scenario is that we will be able to adjust the translucency in System Preferences, either on a sliding scale or simply on/off.

While I am hoping for option three, I am more inclined to expect option one at launch with someone quickly figuring out that Apple actually gave us option two. If using the Terminal with Defaults Write does indeed provide necessary, I will post instructions here in the blog as well is in the FAQ/Instructions.

If one of you who happens to be running 10.5 in beta (and I know you are out there) right now would care to share a bit of enlightenment on this topic, I’d be thrilled to share it.

One thing which I have been asked is if I will change the way I tag pictures in response to this new functionality. Not at this time. Currently, I am anticipating that no change will be necessary. If I prove to be incorrect on this, then I will probably adjust the tagging only to the extent of reducing its contrast against the backgrounds rather than moving or eliminating it.

So far, I’ve sidestepped giving any opinion on this new interface change. My first pass at this post a couple of months ago was entirely flame. I didn’t limit my flame to the translucent menu bar. My kerosene splashed heavily on the Stacks and streamed down onto the 3-D Dock. Obviously, I never actually posted that one, and in a brazen fit of lucidity, I finally deleted it outright, never to be seen by the world. Instead, I’ll share this little parable.

One day many years ago, a young man discovered that through the magic of the Terminal he could make his Terminal windows utterly transparent. And he did so. And life was good. Except that he soon discovered that he could not read what was in his Terminal windows because parts of what lay behind his Terminal windows were black. And so he employed the magic of the Terminal again and made his Terminal windows less Transparent. And life was good. Alas, he soon discovered that those his friends were wowed by his partially transparent Terminal windows, he still could not read them effectively. And back to the Terminal he went again. And this time, he set his transparency such that he could just make out vaguely what lay behind his windows, such that he could tell where his other windows lay yet was not distracted by them. And life was good. A few years later, this transparency adjustment found itself directly within the Preferences of Terminal. And life was grand.

I could also convey The Tale of Super-Slo-Mo-Genie Effect at this point, but suffice it to say that the Genie’s escapes from the bottle all occurred within a few mere months and numbered less than a score.