Smashing Magazine

If you’ve never heard of this site, I highly recommend it. While it is aimed mostly at designers and web developers there is a lot of content there to keep the non-geek interested. Today I’m going to highlight a particular post on the site:

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: October 2009

Seeing as how tomorrow is October, I figured I would point you to some awesome computer desktop calendar backgrounds. Now, in order to fully enjoy your new calendar, you’ll want to free up your desktop of all those pesky icons. Here’s how:

Windows

I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but here are a couple that I know.

Windows XP

Right-click on your desktop, select Arrange Icons By, uncheck Show Desktop Icons.

Windows Vista

Same steps as above except you select View and then uncheck Show Desktop Icons.

Software Solution

There is a little application called Iconoid that gives you WAY more flexibility in how you control your desktop icons.

As you can see above, there are a lot of tabs there that will allow you to customize your desktop icon experience.

Mac OSX

While I was looking into hiding the desktop icons on my Mac, I came across this interesting post at osxdaily.com. Rather than try the solution proposed, I checked out one of the apps recommended in the comments: Camouflage. It lets you hide icons, and double-click on your wallpaper to go to your Desktop folder in Finder. Right-click on your wallpaper and you’ll see an option to show your icons again. I suggest having this launch at login, to save you the trouble of activating it every time.