![]() With this system, when I start reading something I know will blow away my five-minute break, I click to minimize it to my dock for retrieval later. Deep-surfing RSS feeds is my most frequent vice. I’ve found this approach to screen expansion-making more with less-works nicely, acting as a natural encouragement to concentration and organization. (In a winningly antique way of transitioning between tasks, the screens shuttle across like a ball bouncing along a roulette wheel.) I use Spaces to divide my desktop into three areas: word processing, spreadsheets, and dashboard-type applications (e-mail, newsreader, and calendar), with each screen a quick keystroke away. The goal is to parcel your applications into task-specific groups. Deep within the steamer trunk of features in this fall’s Mac OS X Leopard update is an innocuous-seeming application called Spaces that is designed to extend desktop real estate. But does any of this stuff actually work? As every freelance writer is a trusted authority on the powers of distraction, I decided to put a range of programs through the paces to see if they helped complete my daily computing tasks more punctually and efficiently. Zenware promises to help the ADHD user who lurks in each of us. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll benefit most from their absence. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware. There’s an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. Chances are, you’re reading this alongside a flurry of other twinkling points of attention splayed across your monitor. (I could cite some pertinent statistics, but I don’t trust myself to get back to this word processor window.) Ask any designer: Without white space, humans have difficulty focusing. It’s blindingly obvious to note that disarray is one of the defining aspects of the frequent Web user. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. ![]() Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. If your computer desktop is anything like mine-and, brother, it is-you’ve paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter.
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