This post is part of the series of posts about Minimalism

The first approach of my mac-minimalism was to mod everything to look minimalistic and eventually be minimalistic. I wanted to achieve that with custom icons, a custom theme for the OS X, having no Menu-Bar-Icons as few as possible Dock Icons and to use GeekTools for process-stats, calendar, time and weather stuff.

All that was great, it really looked nice and was practical. But there was one downside: I spend more time modding the system than actually using it. Often I was sitting in-front of the computer thought: damn, there is a new app and the icon does not fit into my icon set so I had to create a new special icon for that application right away, what needs some time to be done.

My second approach to mac-minimalism now is just to use what is already there. Do not spend time with modding anything. Just use the stuff. Doing that I realized that Mac OS X Snow Leopard already is quiet minimalist. You do not have to spend much time to get it even more minimalist. Some of the things that I try to keep in mind now is:

• Run Fewer Programs in the Background (needs less RAM)
• Use the Menu-Bar for what its made: Background-Processes and Settings for:
  • DropBox
  • Bluetooth
  • Wi-Fi
  • Batteri
  • Date&Time
• The Dock can be hidden so get icons in there

One more things I use is QuickSilver for application launching and as a calculator. Plus I have written some action-scripts to do stuff like “count-words” and write a log-file of what I do.

This was post number two of the series of posts about Minimalism. Go check out the others

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