A workaround to hide the desktop in 10.2

Jul 22, '03 10:41:00AM

Contributed by: sinjin

My favorite TinkerTool feature back in the day (OS X 10.0, 10.1) was the ability to "turn off" the Desktop (which the more savvy amongst us could do by editing com.apple.finder.plist). Apple, always knowing better than we mere mortals, saw fit to take this away from us with Jaguar (10.2).

If you enjoy a clean Desktop, check out my work around for keeping it clutter free using only OS X's built in features. If you don't understand why anyone would care about this, move on to the next hint, we don't need your kind here!

OK, you admit you are retentive. The basics to my solution are in the four steps below, modify to your tastes. You can do any or all of the steps, with "all" giving you a perfectly clean Desktop.

  1. In Finder preferences, turn off the showing of hard disks, servers and removable media.

  2. Create a new folder wherever you find convenient, called something like "Downloads," "Temp," "Saves," etc. For fast Finder access, it is a good idea to add this folder to your "Favorites" directory, and drop it in the Dock and in the Finder Toolbar.

  3. Update all of your applications that default to Desktop downloads (e.g. web browsers, FTP clients, email apps) to download to the new folder (note that you don't have to do this if you choose to use my AppleScript below).

  4. Choose a method of keeping your desktop clean:

Analysis, comments and gotchas
What I like about the secod solution is it leaves Apple's design intact so future OS X modifications are not likely to break your "hidden Desktop" settings. It doesn't eat up extra CPU cycles or RAM, as running "cover-up" applications will (e.g. DeskShade Plus). And finally, by enabling the folder actions I provided, the Desktop becomes a large drag'n'drop sink-hole for whisking away files and folders that you drop there. Note the possibility of adding criteria to the Folder Actions; you could specify to which folder a file should go based on properties like file extensions as per a previous hint (e.g. everything ending in .jpg goes to the "Photos" folder).

This was my first AppleScript, ever, and it's been a "good enough" solution for me. I'm sure a seasoned scripter could do better and hope that someone will share improvements in the comments. Limitations I've found so far:

  1. If you move a bunch of files to the Desktop, and any of them has the same name as a file in your target folder, all of the files in that move will get marooned on your Desktop. You will have to manually moved them, or change their names, at which point they will then continue their journey.
  2. Some applications are smart enough to follow the redirected files after a save, but others will maroon a file on the Desktop on your second save (because of limitation number one). So you need to be careful to know which is the most recent file.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030719230615357