One thing I am finding with my Mac and the way I am using it is icons seem to just accumulate on my desktop.

One feature I love– and that I know is contributing to this clutter– is my Mac’s “screen shot” feature. When I hit the “APPLE-SHIFT-4″ key combination, my Mac’s cursor turns into a camera. I just select the area, and when I click the mouse I hear a camera’s shudder type sound. The file gets saved as an image on my desktop.

When I FTP files, it is way easier to drag and drop one image or data file onto your desktop than pick or create a folder just to drag it in and out. This “in transit” file means more clutter.

But every few days I end up with a cluttered desktop of stuff I don’t think I’ll need– but am not 100% sure about– so since I have the space I just move it into a “from desktop– need to sort” folder. It is basically creating another, completely virtual, “in box” that can get much bigger much quicker.

I know how the file system works and am still committed to getting my data mine– which includes everything from recent letters to nearly ten year old college papers– organized a little better.

I must admit that I found this a lot easier to deal with on Windows because you needed a folder for everything. So I would try to save them all in that folder.

Although it was easy to save items on the desktop, it was nearly as easy to save it anywhere else. On my Mac, I am finding that every time I want to save something somewhere I have to get a finder window open, find out where i want to put the file, and then drag it there.

It is a heck of a lot easier to me to drag something to the desktop than have to deal with that.

Also, when I am editing image files– like when I put the gray box around that screen shot of my screen up there– it is a heck of a lot easier to just edit it on the desktop, drag it to my image server, and be done. That creates more desktop clutter.

On the flip side to that, though– is that Tiger’s “Spotlight” feature is fantastic. It almost makes it so that I don’t need to care where things are because I can find it with spotlight.