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While a personal computer obviously offers opportunities for increased productivity or learning, it is also a canvas for individual expression. How the computer starts up, what sounds it makes, which screen saver it activates, or what background it displays are all individual choices. Some operating systems, like Windows 95, even make it possible for a shared computer to look and act differently for each user.
Changing the desktop background, the color or image displayed behind any other icon or open window, is one of the easiest ways to personalize a computer. A background could consist of different colors or patterns, cartoons or photographs, or even a web page. As described below, all of these items can be altered on both Macintosh and Windows computers through built-in features or "add-on" programs.
Desktop Patterns. With the introduction of Mac OS 7.5, users had a built-in control panel named Desktop Patterns. This control panel, available to System 7.1 users as a third-party application, allows Mac owners to choose from up to 226 different patterns.
Desktop Pictures (Mac OS 8). Mac OS 8 raised desktop customizing to new levels. Using the Desktop Pictures control panel, nearly any graphic file can quickly become a desktop background.
Desktop Pictures can really jazz up the computer's desktop. To test this effect,
Getting Pictures from the Web. Desktop Pictures supports many of the popular graphic formats such as JPEG, GIF and PICT. Since most graphics available on the web are JPEG, any graphic saved from a web page can be used as a desktop background. Use Netscape or Internet Explorer to get graphics by holding the mouse button down over the desired image until a pull-down menu appears. From Netscape, select "Save this Image as" from the menu (or in Internet Explorer, choose "Download Image to Disk"), choose a destination location for the image, and click "Save."
The UO server CC Public Domain has a collection of photos and clip art in the Art-Fonts-Icons-Sounds folder that can also be used.
Selection Tips: Two important items to keep in mind when setting a desktop background under Mac OS 8 are the size of the graphic and its origin.
Size. The size of the graphic is important if you wish to fill the entire screen with the background. The Desktop Pictures control panel offers choices for placement of the background, including "Position Automatically," "Tile on Screen," "Center on Screen," "Scale to Screen" and "Fill Screen." A tiny graphic will become distorted if it is made to scale to the screen or fill the screen.
Origin of the Graphic. The origin of the graphic is important for two reasons. The first is legal: copyrights may prohibit the copying and use of some graphics available on the Internet.
The second reason has more to do with the functionality of the Desktop Pictures control panel. If a graphic on CC Public Domain or another networked Macintosh is selected as the desktop background, Desktop Pictures will simply "link" to the picture, rather than copying it into the Sample Desktop Pictures folder or the System Folder. To use that graphic as the desktop background, the computer must find the original image. If a picture on CC Public Domain is selected, the computer will attempt to connect to CC Public Domain to use the graphic. This process is cumbersome and inefficient. The best approach when using an image from the web or another computer is to save a copy of it into a specific folder (such as Sample Desktop Pictures) on the Macintosh hard drive.
Windows 95 and NT both use the Display control panel to modify the desktop background. Choose "Control Panels" from "Settings" off the Start menu and double-click the Display control panel, or simply right-click an open area on the desktop and choose "Properties" from the pull-down menu to get to it. The Appearance and Background tabs both control how the desktop looks.
Color and Size Modifications. The Appearance tab modifies the color and size of different desktop components. Windows 95 and NT have built-in schemes to adjust many features quickly, but each item can also be modified independently. Choosing "desktop" from the Item list and changing its color is especially useful if the selected background is a different color than the color surrounding the desktop icon labels.
Patterns and Wallpaper. The Background tab varies either the "Pattern" or "Wallpaper" displayed on the desktop. A "Pattern" imposes a uniform look on top of the color chosen from the Appearance tab. A "Wallpaper" is the same as a Macintosh Desktop Picture-it can be anything from a photograph that's been scanned, to an image from a favorite web page.
Windows 95 has one significant advantage and one important disadvantage in modifying desktop backgrounds when compared to Mac OS 8. The advantage is the ease of using web-based graphics such as Wallpapers. Right-clicking on a graphic in either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer produces a menu which includes the option "Set as Wallpaper." Selecting this option will save the image to the computer and display it in the background configuration (tiled or centered) that was chosen from the Background tab in the Display control panel. These images will be called either Netscape Wallpaper or Internet Explorer Wallpaper in the Wallpaper list. Because these are generic names, however, the next time a Wallpaper is selected from Netscape or Internet Explorer, it will overwrite the existing Wallpaper.
But compared with Macintosh Desktop Pictures, Windows 95 is significantly limited in the number of file formats it supports for Wallpapers. While Macintosh Desktop Pictures can support multiple formats-including the most popular formats available on the web-the only format supported by Windows 95 is the .BMP, or bitmap, format. A scanned photograph or comic strip needs to be saved into a .BMP format by the scanning or graphics software. Images saved from web pages (by right-clicking on them and selecting "Save Image As" in Netscape or "Save Picture As" in Internet Explorer) will need to be saved as .BMP images.
Internet Explorer actually supports that format as a "Save as type" option, making it the easier program to use for saving graphics to Wallpaper images. Images saved using Netscape would require a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, a commercial application, or Irfan View32, a free program available on the Duckware CD-ROM or the UO server "Public," to convert them to .BMP format. (The built-in Windows Paint program will not open standard web graphics).
Note: Any image used as a Windows 95 or NT desktop background needs to be stored in the C:\WINDOWS directory in order to be recognized by the Display control panel.
Both the Macintosh and Windows 95/NT operating systems provide a variety of tools to add personality to a computer's desktop. Although images that are protected by a copyright or are inappropriate for the computer's location should be avoided, there are thousands of colors, patterns, pictures and other images to choose from to change a computer's personality every time it's turned on.
- Matthew Latterell (mlattere@oregon.uoregon.edu )