The Question is: How do you use your desktop?

There seems to be an obsession lately with having little widgets, sidebars, gadgets and such on ones desktop.

It started back with the Google Desktop Sidebar, then Vista had it’s own Windows Sidebar, now Windows 7 is morphing the Windows Sidebar into floating Gadgets, and even the Linux/UNIX KDE 4.x.x desktop has it’s Plasmoids and there is a package for the GNOME desktop called gDesklets. It seems everyone wants these little things on their desktop…except for me.

Personally, I rarely ever see my desktop! Every user, however, is different. My co-worker in the next cubicle has a whole slew of icons and documents and who knows what else taking up over half of his desktop, yet I never, ever save anything there. In fact, I usually hide my desktop icons – why? I never see them!

The same goes for the “gadgets” and such. Usually, the “Windows Sidebar” is the first thing I disable in my ritualistic pruning of Windows Vista into a usable Operating System, as it seems to use anywhere from 12-24MB of RAM. Now, with modern machines with multi-gig RAM configurations, that may seem trivial, but why would I want to just waste RAM on something I will never see, nor use?

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, or just set in my ways, but here is how my desktop is usually set up:

• Desktop Icons hidden
• Quick Launch icons set to Large
• Windows Explorer and Recycle Bin icons added to Quick Launch.
• Other frequently used applications “pinned” to the Start Menu with “Small Icons” set in the Start Menu’s preferences

Here are a couple of screenshots:

This configuration just seems to work for me. My taskbar is fairly “clean” at the moment (I actually rebooted my machine earlier today – which is really a rarity ), but often I have a whole slew of things open: Virtual Machines in VirtualBox, multiple browser windows (often multiple browser apps), instant messages, Remote Desktop Sessions, PuTTY sessions, Word docs, Excel files, etc. Most of these applications are “maximized” and it would take me ages to even get to my desktop, much less check a “gadget” to see what the temperature is outside, or see a thumbnail slideshow of the photos in my “Pictures” directory.

I guess I could summarize by saying “The desktop metaphor, to me, is very 1990’s”. Don’t you think it’s time to move on? With the exception of the gadgets (which thankfully don’t seem to be turned on by default), Windows 7 is a great move in the right direction, and I do like the new design of the taskbar – and I am very thankful all traces of the horridly archaic “Classic” Start Menu appear to be forever gone!

Oskar Barnack, the man behind the original Leica camera designed the system to use 35mm movie film because of his asthma. A smaller lighter camera gave him the opportunity to walk and take photos which erstwhile equipment prevented due to its large size — 35mm was and is a miniature format. Yet today super-zooms and cameras including my own EOS 3 whilst undoubtedly robust, it is a big camera and does not make for long journeys on foot in my book. I have done it and for me I found the camera was not getting used because of its weight at the end of the day. You can read more about that in a previous blog post.

Having bought the M2, the plan was not so much to replace the EOS 3 but to have a smaller, lighter camera to use on occassion on walks. The reverse has happened, the M2 is fast becoming the only camera I use. From walks to pub gatherings and taking the odd silly snap down a night club, the M2 has become a a fantastic camera.
This is a short blog post of why I think this and perhaps this might work to your advantage.

Today is a good case in point, I woke up at 3:45am (early I know but sunrise shots do require early shots) and in the event wasn’t overly enamoured with taking my EOS 3, neither a tripiod or indeed taking the Mamiya. I just felt like taking it easy today, and thankfully with a smaller camera like the Leica M2 with a small set of replaceable lenses you have a lightweight, very robust system that can be flexible as well.

On arriving to the starting point Burton Mill Pond it took a while for the light levels to increase before I could start shooting (I was starting with Tri-X at box speed) but this didn’t bother me too much as shortly with the ease of holding the camera pretty steady at 1/15th (which is at least a stop or even two-stops slower than I can hold with an SLR with a 35mm focal length lens) it soon became apparent that not having the tripod wasn’t a hinderance. (I was shooting at f/5.6 with infinity ever so slightly out of focus, to emphasise the morning mist)

The other bonus with a small camera is that you can get into nooks and crannies and places where I find it hard to hold a camera securely or steadily. One of the best cameras for this is possibly the Olympus XA which has a decent fast 35mm (f/2.8) although the rangefinder patch is quite faint on many of them now as they have aged and they’re not quite as durable as the mechanisms in say a Leica or indeed the new rangefinders from Voigtlander or Zeiss (Cosina basically.)

Maybe some day you should give it a try, go out with a smaller camera: a decent digital compact, or a nice simple film compact, or maybe even dip your toes into a rangefinder system if you like the feel of it. It’s perhaps not for everyone, but the simplicity of the M2 is where I find my creativity is growing because I’m not worrying about meter settings, exposure compensation dials, auto-focus methods and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, the EOS 3 is a fantastic camera, but more often than not, I’m finding the M2 to be a much more favourable companion. The EOS 3 has definitely become pretty much my telephoto camera.