TUAW Desktop of the Week for 2/18 - 2/24/07

Hi, James here. Thanks for the award and all the views!

I just updated the photo caption to (hopefully) answer everything that I left unsaid.

Spot on - the wallpaper was from Big Huge Lab's Mosaic Maker. I set the tiles to Medium, and a 6x6 grid, then simply tiled the background.

The icons are the Icon Factory's Agua and Agua Extras.

The Adium theme is a modified version of Decay 2.0.

Again, thanks everyone!

since we're on the topic.....My itunes screensaver doesn't work anymore. I've searched for tips, but the only problem reported is that it only shows the artwork that was downloaded by itunes (or something like that). That's not my problem. I switched the number of rows I wanted, and when I tried to switch back, it closed the screensaver window, and asked if I wanted to reopen it. When I did, it locked on the itunes screensaver, but used the last SS I had on. It hasn't worked for months. Can I just download a new copy of itunes to fix it?

After seeing this on Sunday, I decided to make my own mosaic desktop by creating a new copy of iTunes using Libra (http://homepage.mac.com/sroy/libra) and then filling it with multiple copies of a very short song, assigning each copy a unique album title and then adding my own pictures for the album cover by using EasyCrop (yellowmug.com) and a custom ratio of 4x4 and making each picture about 400x400 pixels in size. Then it was simply a matter of drag and drop from iPhoto to EasyCrop to iTunes. Then set the Screen Saver in the System Preferences to iTunes Artwork. Last step was to download the free software from bgstech.com called bgscreensaver 1.1. Works beautifully as long as I leave iTunes set to the bogus library. If I switch back to my regular iTunes, then the album covers associated with that library become my desktop. Albums flipping on the desktop as well as the screensaver. Very cool but hard to work with if your desktop is cluttered with icons.

#11: I would bet something like that is coming in Leopard. I've *heard* (cough cough!) that there are a *lot* of new CoreAmination-infused screensaver additions in 10.5.

Does anyone know of a screensaver that takes your pictures from iPhoto and flips them similar to the iTunes artwork screensaver? It would be a great addition to see multiple pictures of my own flipping around on the screen...

Those voting for Mosaic Maker are write - James confirms it in the comments on flickr.

It can be done with Posterino as well. http://zykloid.com/posterino/

easy to understand app, but unfortunately a bit pricey.

Actually, it probably was http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/mosaic.php - if you look at the screenshot, there are only 6x6 shown (the pics start repeating in the horizontal direction). Either way - neat idea!

Here you go. Try this: http://www.flickrleech.net/ I made a bunch of cool desktops just by maximising Safari, taking a screen grab and editing the file in Photoshop.

This wasn't done with http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/mosaic.php
because the max they allow is 6x6 photos, and the desktop in this post is more than that.
I'm sure you can do this all by hand with Photoshop, but it would take some time. Not hard to do though.