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My Living Desktop's scene store brings more life to your Mac

On Friday, we had a short piece about some half-off deals on Bodega, the "app store" for OS X. One of the applications that was receiving the discount deal was a popular desktop program from Amuse, Inc. called My Living Desktop (US$34.95).

If you've never seen My Living Desktop in action, it's pretty amazing. Right now, I have a beautiful sunset scene taken at a swimming pool over looking the ocean filling my view on the 27" iMac screen. The clouds are moving, there's the constant sound of running water in the pool and the far-off crashing of the waves, and occasionally you'll hear a seagull. This, and the other scenes that are included with My Living Desktop, are very relaxing and visually stunning.

The app, which has been available for Macs since 2005, replaces your static desktop with videos. Sure, that's something that Windows Vista and 7 can do out of the box, but for Macs it takes this one little piece of software. My Living Desktop doesn't use many of the resources of your computer, and you can adjust how often the scenes change, turn off the sound if it's distracting, and even add your own video scenes. My favorite feature is the "Automatic Serenity Break,", which reminds you to take a break and smell the virtual flowers every so often.

As if the calming powers of My Living Desktop weren't enough, the developer has now added a Scene Store. It's the location to view and purchase additional video scenes for the desktop. The Scene Store features scenes ranging from single scenes to ScenePaks with many related sequences, with prices ranging from $2.95 up to $9.95.

Mac owners who are tired of the static scenes on their desktops now have an ever-growing choice of relaxing video clips to keep their Macs looking good.

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On Friday, we had a short piece about some half-off deals on Bodega, the "app store" for OS X. One of the applications that was receiving...
 

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matthew_treder

Any chance there'll be another half-off deal sometime soon?

August 31 2010 at 6:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
turnovertogod

Yes, but the value that I receive from it is so worth it.
I feel so relaxed by the sound of waves, birds, etc., and I can stay connected with nature while working at home. I love My Living Desktop!

August 30 2010 at 10:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
comrade

meh.. why consume cpu/gpu unnecessarily? save hardware resources for flash! lol

August 30 2010 at 3:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to comrade's comment
earthlover11

I've used My Living Desktop for a while, but I never noticed any slowing down of my computer. I seem to remember the developer saying something about the software being smart about throttling itself down so you never notice any speed issues. I recommend that you try yourself.

August 30 2010 at 11:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
scott

How long are the scenes (ie can you see a true 24 hour cycle from dawn to day to dusk to night to dawn)? If so...is there any way to sync it to a clock (ie. so you see the sunrise happening at the time the sun rises, and it turn to night when it is night)...

August 30 2010 at 3:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to scott's comment
Tom

I installed it once and remember that the scenes are very short. There was a very nice seen of a harbor at sunset, and the same boat passes every two minutes which is kind of lame.

August 30 2010 at 3:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mohaas05

You can do it for free with your screensaver using Onyx.

The only thing I hate about these is that it makes your menubar opaque.

August 30 2010 at 2:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kevin Munoz

You can do more or less the same thing with Mach Desktop, for only $10.

http://www.machsoftwaredesign.com/desktop.html

(Just a satisfied user, no connection to the company.)

August 30 2010 at 1:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Kevin Munoz's comment
kevyk

My Living Desktop is very different from Mach Desktop. It comes with over 26 scenes taken from all over the world plus it has a built in mediation minder called Automatic Serenity Breaks and comes with a built-in Screen Saver to boot. I use it myself and have for years. I LOVE it! Every time I show it to friends they are so blown away with what this piece of software can do.

And now the developer just opened a new scene store continuing all kinds of scenes and says they are adding more and more scenes to this store all the time.

I highly recommend it (plus there's a free trial and 100% MBG too).

August 30 2010 at 10:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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