Click on the thumbnail, and you’ll get a vision of what I work on every evening. Naturally I’m on an iMac, so I get all the goodness of the Mac OS. For my wallpaper, I’ve chosen a beautiful picture of – get this – a Snow Leopard. I love the black and white photo, with the brilliant blue eyes. Very simple, but stunning.
I keep the Dock at the right these days, because it takes up less space that way. It’s smaller than default to further minimize it’s use of screen real estate. And further. I only keep a few programs there. Finder, Mail, Safari, Contacts, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Tweetie, and my Documents & Downloads folders. I’ll probably cut out Contacts and iCPhoto soon, as I don’t use them constantly. I don’t hide the Dock, because I find it quite useful. I do use the Minimize to Application feature built into Snow Leopard. If I minimize Safari windows, they go into the icon, rather than next to the trash can. Just another way of keeping the Dock clean and uncluttered.
Menu Bar
I don’t like to have dozens of icons in my menu bar – I like it to stay clean. Currently the only things sitting up there are icons for Tweetie ( when it’s open ), and Mozy, my online backup service. That’s it, besides the date/time and Spotlight icon. I’ve turned off everything else – the choice is usually in the programs Preferences.
Clear Desktop
No icons litter my desktop – I keep it completely bare. I’ve also removed the drive icons. The only thing that shows up is the CD drive, when it’s loaded. That isn’t often, so it’s empty 99% of the time.
That’s it – I keep things pretty bare. If an application isn’t on my Dock, I simply use Spotlight to open it. Many folks use Quicksilver or Launchbar to open applications, but Spotlight seems to do everything I need. If I can avoid installing yet another application, so much the better.