Here's the latest incarnation of my desktop. The Dock is auto-hidden on the left, my menu bar contains only the items I think are essential, and my Desktop is devoid of disks, folders, and files.

Minimal Mac is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sites of late.  It provides a daily dose of quotes, tips, and related snippets about the virtues of keeping your Mac experience as simple and bloat-free as possible.

I’ve recently reworked my desktop to embrace a lot of the ideas discussed on the site.  I’ve gone to an auto-hiding Dock, de-cluttered my menu bar, and removed any sign of files, drives, or folders from the Desktop.

And let me tell ya…  it feels great.  I never realized how much of a distraction some of these things were to me until they were gone (Gmail Notifier I am talking to you!).

While I’ve done some scripting, changed some preference settings, and tweaked various things here and there to get to this “minimal” state, the key to success has been having a good keyboard launcher.  I’m using LaunchBar, and it works great.  Anything I could possibly want to access is just a keypress or two away.

Good stuff.