Add depth to your desktop! Desktop Textures is a collection of textures specifically designed to make your Macintosh desktop look better.

Desktop Textures also includes the premier set of utilities for collecting and creating textures and installing them on the Macintosh desktop. Desktop Textures has become the standard utility for viewing and installing the many textures created by people around the world.

You can download Desktop Textures for the Macintosh.

Using Desktop Textures

Want to use a texture in a World-Wide Web page or on your Windows box? Want to redistribute Desktop Textures? Please read the Desktop Textures Copyright, which tells you all about what to do.

Current features

Macintosh

• Three volumes of textures suitable for use on any color or greyscale machine (some also look good on black-and-white computers such as the SE/30)
• One 32-bit texture supplement (intended for users with many colors on their displays)
• The latest version of the Desktop Textures Suite of programs

The main program in the Desktop Textures Suite is the Texture Installer, which allows you to install any textures on your Macintosh desktop. The installer also helps you maintain and look through collections of textures and even make your own.

Also in the Desktop Textures Suite are the Texture Randomizer, which will temporarily install a random texture from a set of textures you choose, and the Texture Scroller, which can be helpful for creating smoothly-repeating textures.

You can download Desktop Textures for the Macintosh.

X Window System

I also created a shell script that installs in your X display or window manager's root window a random texture chosen from all the textures it finds. Just like the Texture Randomizer for the Macintosh.

Sorry, I don't have the distribution put together at the moment, since it was removed from the only ftp server it existed on. If you send us mail asking for it, I'll probably get around to collecting it all together.

Future features

• Add many more textures, of course!
• You should be able to create "contact sheets" of any texture files. For the non-photographer, this would a contact sheet would be a single image containing a small image of each texture so that you can see them all at once, rather than one-at-a-time.
• The configuration of the Randomizer should be removed from the Randomizer itself, probably into the Installer. That would get rid of the kludgy hold-down-the-option-key configuration method that you have to use now.
• Support Drag and Drop for textures -- between texture files, between the Installer and other applications, and maybe even to and from the desktop!
• Depending on the strengths of the Appearance Manager in Copland, the installation of textures may become less important. In this case, the Texture Installer will shift toward being a utility to collect and edit textures (and also install them if you like).

The idea has also been going around for a while of distributing a Texture Edition -- something like 1.4 MB of just textures. I would, of course, mail this to everyone who has sent us something for Desktop Textures.

Other texture resources

• Many other people have created textures for use with the Texture Installer. I have collected links to some of them on this page.

Anthony's Icon Library

• Anthony Thyssen keeps a preview of a few of the Desktop Textures, so you can see immediately what they look like. That page is part of Anthony's Icon Library, which you may also want to check out for other X pixmap and GIF icons and patterns.

Ben Moss tells you how to use Desktop Textures as WWW backgrounds in Fun with Backgrounds. Unfortunately, this link is also broken at the moment.