The shareware developers at MacRabbit have released DeskShade Plus 1.0, a US$6.99 utility for Mac OS X that’s designed to hide, or “drop,” icons that can clutter up your desktop picture.
The “faceless application” (it has a menu bar control) forwards “dropped” files to a folder of your choice. It offers systemwide hot keys and timed updating of the desktop if you prefer not to do it manually.
DeskShade Plus also had a DeskMovie feature that lets you use any QuickTime video as a moving desktop picture. You can have anything from moving clouds to a family clip. You can choose if/how you want to loop your movie, at what size you want it displayed, and whether to play the audio or not. If your system is running Mac OS X 10.2, DeskMovie can take advantage of the transparency options in its Quartz Extreme engine.
DeskShade Plus also sports a DeskLock component that lets you protect your Mac when you’re absent and leave on-screen messages. You just enter a password and an away message. DeskLock can handle multiple fonts, colors, styles and images — even a small photo album — in the away message. MacRabbit says there are no limitations, except the size of your screen.
DeskLock also has a feature called the HackerLog. While your desktop is locked, DeskShade Plus monitors all attempts to unlock it. When you return and unlock your desktop, you’ll be presented with a window that details an overview of all actions that happened between locking and unlocking. The HackerLog gives you a summary of wrong passwords and the clicking of the cancel button, with a time stamp to see when it happened.