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In a previous post about a great Mac wallpaper some one asked about compiling a list of great wallpapers for the Mac. I like good wallpapers. Some pieces of art are amazing and are definitely worth being adorned on your desktop. This post is not going to go through a list specific wallpapers, as peoples tastes vary, as well as this it would probably kill my bandwidth. I am going to link to collections which you should check out and every so often cite good examples. As always if you have a good site or wallpaper please leave a comment.

The idea for this post came from a request by Joshua. He asked: “Is there a program which can enable you to set a movie as the wallpaper”. I didn’t bother looking for a program, I immediatly turned to Quartz Composer. There is probably a program out there which can enable to do such as thing. But this post is going to focus on Quartz instead. The idea behind this post is to set up a screensaver, which is your movie, and then play it on the desktop. Very simple and very effective.

If you are new to Quartz Composer I reccommend you check out An Introdcution to Quartz Composer, Gradient Image Reflection and Video Distortion. These three posts introduce both background knowledge, and more complex tutorials. This post is going to be quite simple in comparision. But it may gloss over a couple of points which mayt be mentioned in previous posts.

If you use your desktop a lot you usually end up with a lot of files and shortcuts scattered about the place. You may run out of room quickly but there is a new option that has been implemented in the new Leopard build to enable you to change the spacing between the icons.