I wonder if I’m the only person who does this: I collect background images for my computer like crazy. If I see a post on Lifehacker about computer backgrounds, I must click on it to see what sort of spiffy backgrounds there are, and I’ve downloaded zillions of them. I even pay for a subscription to Digital Blasphemy to get the subscriber-only backgrounds because I think they’re cool and I like the idea of someone being able to make a living doing backgrounds and graphics.
But I almost never see my computer’s desktop. Every square inch of screen real estate is consumed with application windows.
So why do I bother with backgrounds at all? Anybody have a theory? (“You’re an idiot,” may be the best theory, but let’s avoid that one for now.)
Making it your background might be a way for you to say you own it, sort of like a person would like to own a work of art.
Or maybe for the rare occurrence where you do minimize all windows, you like to have a background that makes you look at it a few seconds longer than if it was just a standard vanilla background.
I wrote a script that downloads interesting pictures from Flickr and make them my background every hour:
http://blog.codeeg.com/2006/08/15/desktop-backgrounds-w-flickr/
It’s nice because every once in a while I will minimize all windows and find myself staring a new background. It’s sort of like a short mental palette cleansing.