I am reporting from Needham, where noise about a little control panel for the Macintosh has grown so much in recent months that it is drawing attention to the sleepy Boston suburb from around the world.
ﾒI canﾕt believe I ever lived without it,ﾓ exclaims Pauly Mann as she restarts her mac for the third time. ﾒ The excitement I get from seeing an unexpected color pop up makes the frequent crashing of my web browser almost enjoyable!ﾓ We watch intently together as the Macintosh OS bar crawls across the dull gray screen until flash! - the new color temporarily blinds us. ﾒIt gives me goose bumps every time,ﾓ croons Pauly. Her earrings jingle and her hair stands up just a little bit more.
ﾒPeople are often surprised by this,ﾓ mumbles Dave McGuinn, the stony faced button down tie librarian, ﾒbut I actually like variety. Nothing too wild mind you, but variety nonetheless.ﾓ I press him for a little more information. He continues in a low drone, ﾒIﾕve tried those horrible patterns, but they make me dizzy. Before 7.5 I could get in and create my own colors, but this! This is a revolution, a new way to live, a totally appealing aesthetic.ﾓ
Here in Needham the fever is growing over this little control panel that changes the color of your desktop every time your restart your Mac. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing, but like all great art, the art is in making it look simple. I am hunting down the real story as I try to track down Bill Mead, one of the masterminds behind this phenomenon. I find him lying on the floor behind a table tugging at a bunch of cables. Mead, a frumpy overweight guy who has forgotten all about shaving tells me the intricate story of Desktop Repainter. He prefaces his comments with information about his background as an artist and his admiration of color field painters like Rothco and Ellsworth Kelly. It all starts to make sense.
ﾒI was setting up new computers for a teacher training session a few summers ago, and I was manually changing the desktop colors so they would all look different, when Paul Messias said ﾔhey, why donﾕt we make a program that does that?ﾕ and Desktop Repainter was conceived.ﾓ Just then Mr. Messias, the man who made Desktop Repainter a reality walked up and handed Mead an Apple IIGS keyboard with a repair slip on it dated April 2nd, 1992. They chuckled about that for a moment, and Messias added, ﾒyes, but there was an instructor who wanted all the screens to be blue! I added a control panel to the original version allowing the dull spineless user to select a basic constant boring blue instead of enjoying the plethora - a virtual rainbow of possible colors.ﾓ Messias explained the various additions and developments that has brought Desktop Repainter to its current state: a fully networkable control panel, with many options that allow users to set their computersﾕ desktops to match or or be unique on a network. ﾒYou can set your own set of colors, and even save sets based on themes of your choice,ﾓ he explains. Messias and Mead, obsessed with this product, seem almost power hungry as they discuss a future where they will be able to control usersﾕ desktops color remotely and create a Desktop Repainter web site that displays ﾒthe color of the day.ﾓ
They only ask that you distribute Desktop Repainter as far and as wide as possible, with this readme of course, and please send them e-mail expressing your enthusiasm and appreciation for Desktop Repainter, or to describe any unusual stories or experiences that involve this program.
