Written by: Adam Christianson
Categories: Cool Stuff, Reviews
I just saw this cool little app over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and tried it out. Desky is a little application that makes it super easy to change your Mac’s desktop in the Finder. All without having to take the usual route of going into the System Preferences. I love simple little apps like this, especially when they work unobtrusively, and Desky does. What makes Desky “click” for me is that you have the choice to place it in the Dock, Finder sidebar, or the Finder toolbar (which is how I have it set up). Then it sits there ready and waiting for you to want to change your desktop background. Once that mood finally strikes, simple drag an image file onto Desky and presto-changeo, you have a new desktop beaming back at you. Sweet! Well worth the asking price, which is free.
This is a cool little app. I’d probably use it if I didn’t already use the Desktop Picture Action plug-in for QuickSilver.
http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/plug-ins/desktop_picture_action
a similar program, though only usable as a menu bar icon, is Picture Switcher. Though rather uncreatively named, in the dropdown menu it offers all of the options that System Preferences does (aka rotating backgrounds, background color, layout, etc.) As a user of rotating backgrounds, i find it preferable.
Thats pretty nifty. I would probably use it, but I made my own automator contexual menu workflow. I call it change desktop image. It get’s the selected finder image and then sets the desktop image. It works very nicely for me.
One more thing I just figured out. If you save this workflow as an aplication, it has the same effect as Desky. You can drag your image over the app and it changes the backround. So, basically it does the same thing as Desky, not to downplay Desky any, but it goes to show Automator is a pretty powerful device capable of almost anything you can think of.
Cool little app. Perfect for the task it does. Thanks for the heads up Adam.
Or right click on Desktop and click change desktop background and change it. Both ways are good.