THE MINIMALIST MAC What's the one part of a computer system that most people see most often? The Desktop. It's an old metaphor, but like the tools that were born with it - windowed interfaces and hardware mice - it's still around because it works. The problem is that a lot of people treat the computer's Desktop as more than just a virtual desk. It doubles as a file storage area, destination for downloads, todo list, and photo gallery. You can't blame people for using it this way - saving to the Desktop is just too easy. People do it because it's quicker than drilling down through layers of folders. Because it's easy, it becomes a habit. Things get messy. Banishing the clutter from your Mac gives you more control, and might boost your productivity. Mac minimalism means using some common sense, some considered personal file management, and one or two third-party applications. CLEAR YOUR DESKTOP - AND KEEP IT CLEAR (SCREENSHOT: busy desktop.png Caption: A typically crowded Desktop; not very easy to use.) If this is an approximation of your computer's Desktop, it might be time to take stock and reconsider how you manage your filesystem. With a little planning and some careful re-arranging of where you keep your stuff, you can reclaim the Desktop and keep it clear. A clean Desktop is just a starting point, but it represents a psychological step towards the larger goal - that of making your whole computer set up neater and more efficient. Clearing the Desktop is never going to be an easy task for anyone who has used it as file storage for a long time, but it is important to invest time in it now. The investment will pay off later. One man who did clean up his computer is Ethan Schoonover (www.ethanschoonover.com), photographer and now a member of the Omni Group software team. In a series of screencasts on his kinkless.com web site earlier this year, he advocated a drastic approach: clear everything off the desktop and stick it all in a new folder with the name "To delete". His system is simple: you have one week to live with your newly clean Desktop, and to get used to the new system of folders you have created for managing information. During that week, you have to go through every single file in the "To delete" folder and either archive it, take action on it, or delete it. After a week, anything that hasn't been dealt with is summarily trashed, along with the folder itself. Schoonover calls his approach "the kinkless Desktop", and the idea is to create a personal workspace with maximum efficiency and minimum fuss. It's almost as minimalist as you can get. (SCREENSHOT: kinkless desktop.png Caption: One suggested way of cleaning things up?) He suggests creating new folders inside your user directory: an Inbox, an Outbox, an Archive, and a Pending folder. An alias of each is placed prominently on the new, clear Desktop. Everything you need is close at hand, but nothing is too hard to find. Filing things away is easy, too - as easy as dragging to the Desktop used to be. That's important, because the aim is to make sure that the Desktop isn't used for storage any more. These new folders are also added as destinations in the Finder's side bar, mainly because that means they will also appear as shortcuts in the "Save As..." dialog box in most applications. Isn't this all just common sense? Perhaps, but if that's the case, a large number of people are needlessly making their lives more complicated by not using theirs. There's no need to stop with removing files from the Desktop. By default, system drives and inserted disks appear there too. For true minimalism, use the Finder's preferences panel to disallow hard disks, iPods, CDs, and servers from appearing on your Desktop. (SCREENSHOT: finder-prefs.png Caption: Remove hard disks and other network paraphernalia from your Desktop for maximum clarity) All of these items are easy to reach from the Finder, which is where you'll usually be moving files around anyway. By evicting them all from the Desktop, you are effectively training yourself to switch to one or more Finder windows every time you need to move files around. This is deliberate: depending on the Desktop as file storage, even temporarily, might lead to re-creating the habit of keeping stuff there in the long term. Before you know it, the mess is back. By isolating your Desktop from your workflow, you remove the temptation to clutter it up again. DE-CLUTTER THE DOCK Love it or hate it, the Dock is another potential source of unnecessary computer clutter. Again, habit often leads people to fill their Docks with everything and anything they can think of, without pausing to think if it would better reached in some other way. Some minimalism purists would argue that the Dock itself should be removed, and indeed there are plenty of hacks and shareware apps that will disable it permanently. Far simpler, though, is just hiding it out of sight using Option+Command+D. For those who prefer to keep the Dock around, there are a few options for giving it the minimalist touch. Dockless (homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/dockless/dockless.html - free) offers some relief, allowing you to toggle whether or not each application you use displays a Dock icon at all. Apps you use all the time can be effectively hidden from view, leaving the Dock free for the things you need to reach less frequently. Stunt Software's Overflow (www.stuntsoftware.com/Overflow/ - about £7) is a dock-within-the-Dock. Items dragged into it will show up when the Overflow icon is clicked, or when a user-defined hotkey is pressed. Rather like the Stacks feature Apple has trumpeted for Leopard, Overflow extends the Dock outwards, literally giving it a new direction. (SCREENSHOT: overflow.png Caption: Overflow keeps the Dock tidy; ClearDock keeps it smart) For visual minimalism, Unsanity's ClearDock (http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/cleardock - free) will remove the Dock's background tint. TransparentDock (http://www.freerangemac.com/TransparentDock2.html - about £4) is another option, better suited to older Macs (it won't work on Intel machines). Ultimately, the aim is to create a Dock that is useful. When dozens of icons are competing for finite screen space, productivity drops while your eyes scan from one side to the other searching for the correct one. LIVING DOCKLESS If you're convinced that you can live without the Dock, a selection of keyboard- and mouse-based launchers offer a great deal, in most cases more than the limited features the Dock provided in the first place. (SCREENSHOTS: quicksilver.png; launchbar.png; butler.png Caption: Quicksilver, LaunchBar and Butler all do roughly the same thing; all of them do it well) LaunchBar (www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/ - about £20), Quicksilver (quicksilver.blacktree.com - free), and Butler (www.manytricks.com/butler/ - free) all offer roughly the same functionality. With a quick keystroke, each of them will leap into life and do your bidding, usually responding to text-based commands. Typing the name of an app will launch it; a file will be opened in its default application. LaunchBar was the first on the market and has age and experience on its side. Quicksilver has brought about many innovations and a plugin-based architecture, with the result that serious users can put it to use as much more than just a launcher. It can control iTunes, move files, send email, initiate file transfers - it's a very powerful application. Development has slowed somewhat in recent months, and it suffers occasional crashes, but is well worth trying nonetheless. Butler has a similar box-of-tricks feel to it. By adopting a catalogue system, matching up commands and shortcuts to files and apps on your computer, it lets you decide what you want quick access to, and how. The learning curve is a little steep to begin with, but the potential for efficiency is high. (SCREENSHOTS: flygesture.png; trampoline.png; sapiens.png Caption: FlyGesture, Trampoline and new arrival Sapiens let you do more with your mouse) If you prefer to use a mouse, there are other options. FlyGesture (www.flyingmeat.com/flygesture - free) is a flexible system for defining your own mouse gestures. Any mouse movement you create can be converted into a command of your choosing - launch this app, open this folder. Alternative mouse-based launchers include Trampoline (www.old-jewel.com/trampoline/ - about £10) and newcomer to the scene, Sapiens (www.donelleschi.com/sapiens/ - about £10 introductory price, rising to £12), which is well worth a try if you're after something that "intelligently" tries to guess which actions you'll want to perform next, and offers quick and easy links to them from your current mouse position. These apps all share the same philosophy: stay out of sight until needed. It's this absence of being that matters to Mac minimalists. By default, the Dock acts the opposite way, intruding on your view whether you need to use its functions or not. SIMPLIFY YOUR FILESYSTEM True Mac minimalism means taking a scythe to your User folder. Re-arrange, re-organise, and ruthlessly trash what's not needed. The aim is to reduce as far as possible the number of folders you use, as high up the filesystem as possible. All your documents and work should be in your default Documents folder, not littering other areas. With Documents, aim to follow Ethan Schoonover's advice or create your own simple folder arrangement; again, with as few new folders as possible. Archive all but the most recent, or most essential current files. Another tip from Schoonover is to create Smart Folders for one or two criteria, to keep the most important or most current files easy to hand. You might need one that finds all text documents modified in the last week, or perhaps another that collates all the spreadsheets created in the last month. How you reach them - via the Dock, a launcher, a Desktop alias or a Finder window - is up to you, but make sure you're not overloading either the Dock or the Desktop. Sometimes Apple's built-in Smart Folder rules aren't flexible enough. Also, they can't do much more than search for files with certain criteria. To really get on top of files, you need shareware product Hazel (www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php - about £10). This excellent preference pane allows you to create rules for almost any circumstance; rules that won't just show files, but will also act upon them in the manner of your choosing. (SCREENSHOT: hazel.png Caption: Hazel watches selected folders and performs actions according to your specifications) Let's say you've followed Ethan Schoonover's advice and created an Inbox. You don't want it to build up and get as cluttered as your Desktop used to be, so you create a rule in Hazel: if any file in the Inbox has not been opened or modified in the last month, set its colour label to red. If the time period is over two months, trash it (or move it to a specific "Inbox Archive" folder) automatically. Your Inbox now has something of a life of its own. Stale items will turn red after a month of disuse, prompting you to do something with them. If they continue to be ignored, after another month they will disappear altogether. Hazel does the leg work; you keep control over your Inbox and there's less chance of feeling overwhelmed by work. Needless to say, Hazel is capable of much more. It can monitor files in many different locations and act on them accordingly. It will remove old downloads, empty your trash, and collate particular kinds of data in particular locations if you ask it to. The £10 licence fee is excellent value if you want to automate some of the more tedious or tricky file management tasks. IS LEOPARD MINIMALIST? There's every sign that the imminent Leopard release will include some basic elements of this minimalist approach. The Stacks feature in Leopard's Dock replicates some of the work done by Overflow; the automatic use of a separate folder for downloads (and a Stack for it created by default in the Dock) keeps the Desktop clear of disk images, video clips and PDFs found online. Even with these new features and all its other innovations, Leopard continues the tradition of the Desktop metaphor, and it will be just as easy to saddle up a Leopard-running Mac with the detritus of daily computing. Minimalism is more than just a look or a fashion; by deliberately paring down what we see when we work with a computer, we can use the minimalist ethos to get more stuff done, more efficiently.