Here’s the scenario:
You have a beautiful (but busy) desktop background displayed on your Mac, but now your desktop icons are more difficult to see.
In the past, my solution for this problem was to open up the image in Photoshop and add a vertical black stripe with 40% opacity on the right side of the wallpaper to improve contrast.
Today I discovered an even better solution: DeskCover version 2.0 by DanicSoft. This little menulet (only 100K) lets you dim part of your desktop underneath your icons so that you can see them easier.
DeskCover is immediately better than my previous workaround because DeskCover automatically resizes itself to fit the icons on your desktop. You can specify a gradient background (and choose its color), a solid background, and even add a border of specified thickness. You can even specify which screen edge you want DeskCover to cover. DeskCover offers multi-monitor support, as well.
You can see the results of my desktop after using DeskCover, in the screen capture below. One with a subtle vertical stripe, and one that’s nearly opaque.
This software fits the mark for my needs, however I do wish I could adjust the opacity of the gradient to make the DeskCover even darker. (Update: this is actually possible – I overlooked it when selecting the color of the vertical stripe.) I’d also like to have the flexibility of dimming more than one edge at a time (say, the right and bottom).
DeskCover works on both Intel and PPC based Macs running Leopard, and is donationware. If you enjoy using it, consider dropping a few bucks towards the developer.
-Krishna
