The desktop is a place of creativity, productivity but most importantly, it’s typically a canvas for your personality. Picking backgrounds, changing colors/cursors/frames, and with enough time and effort, the desktop can become a mirror of you instead of a simple, default, digital space.

While building out Connection Explorer the past few months, I was flipping a lot between dark mode and light mode to try and match colors and styling so that the app would mirror the desktop. And now that the heavy lifting is done, it got me thinking about the various color options and what is everyone else is using?

Light/dark is an easy option, but I always seem to get pulled towards a dark blue – not quite navy blue- but a blue. Every time a I try a green (such as British Racing Green) or a red/yellow variant I can’t seem to stick with them and find myself going back to the defaults or blue again.

I went as far as adding a blue theme to Connection Explorer but had to pull it later as editing three color schemes was a bit much for trying to get the beta out the door without sacrificing the targeted ship date.

Given that my desktop wallpaper is almost always a picture from a national park, that is why I think the other colors never quite work. It also keeps me thinking about creating a WindowBlinds skin that is themed after the national parks: Zion – Red/Orange, Yosemite -grey/blue/green, Death Valley - tan/red, Glacier National Park green/blue/white.

Building all those skins would be a heavy lift but at the same time, a lot of fun too…maybe over the holiday break.