Mach Desktop 17+

On the positive side, they increased the efficiency of playback of quicktime content drastically - previously it would consume a LOT of CPU.

On the downside, they have killed the ability to have the output of a shell command (or contents of a file) displayed on your desktop. This was a HUGE feature, allowing for a LOT of customization (eg. I had a shell script that would fetch stock prices, and then I could dipslay that). Plus the existing desklets are split weirdly (eg. hours/minutes are a different desklet from seconds), and because there is no desklet customization, certain options are where they don't belong (eg. using 24 hour time, or C vs F on temperature are on the desklet selection screen, which makes no sense). Additionlly, although the font dialog has a size option, desklets ignore it and will ensure that they print using the maximum size the box will handle, so you have to resize your box carefully to get correctly sized fonts. This is not a great thing when, say, you are outputitng the month, and it could be May or September, so font sizing using box size is not great. And text doesn't wrap any more, it shrinks.

All in all, the lack of customizability for desklets is a huge step backwards for this app.

The animated desktops are a nice idea, as are the widgets, but in practice the most attractive ones included here are the ones featured in the free version, and a lot of these are plain ugly. I guess I could roll my own using quartz composer, or possibly there is a community of people making good ones out there, but even the good ones here look pretty cheesy. I think if the authors want to save themselves more bad reviews they should post videos on their websites of all of the included desktops so people know what they are getting. I (erroneously) figured the paid version would have even *nicer* desktops than the free version, but only a couple are even on the same level, most are noticeably worse.

Another issue is that the interface is poorly thought out. There are entirely separate settings windows for picking the desktop backgrounds and for customizing and placing widgets, which makes the app cumbersome to experiment with when dialing in a setup.

Despite my 2* rating, I actually really like this app. This is a great way to add a little life to your desktop. It gets a low rating though because it has some flaws that need to be addressed in future updates.

The Good: The beach/mountain/nature wallpapers are absolutely beautiful. The widgets are an excellent feature with some basic customization options.

The Bad: I have this app set to start up upon login but it is pretty slow to load and it just about triples my boot time. Weather widgets are very slow to accept my location. It took over an hour for the weather widget to adjust for my location. On my g/f’s account, her location still shows as the default location and it’s been 3 days since I installed this app. I can adjust the font type, but font size is unresponsive. 24hr clock works on 1 widget (my clock) but on another (sunrise/sunset) it will only display a 12hr clock.

The Ugly: Some of these wallpapers are just horrible looking. There’s an Eiffel Tower wallpaper that would be really nice looking if it weren’t for the fact that the top of the tower is cut off. Same goes for a couple others. Ice Cavern is really cheesey and Windmills is just lol bad.

Even with it’s flaws, I do like this app and plan to keep using it. If the problems I pointed out are corrected with future updates I would easily add a few more stars to my rating.