Hey, you… Stop drooling… That’s MY Mac I’m talking about… You go get yourself your own piece, buster!

I’ve been using it for about a month now, and it’s taken me some time to get used to the interface. It’s great and all… but having used a PC for over 17 years of my 25 years of existence has made me partial to it’s quirks. I needed more to get me hooked. It was then that I came across Shadow Book, Smack Book and VirtueDesktops. VirtueDesktops (Download Link) is no longer in development because the author figured that Leopard‘s spaces would have more to offer. I run tiger for the moment… and I guess I’ll use VirtueDesktops until my copy of Leopard arrives (it’s in the mail).

VirtueDesktops offers multiple different desktops so that you can arrange your applications logically, into conveniently separated views. Shadow book and Smackbook then offer a very ingenious way of switching between these desktops. Smackbook lets you use the motion detector that is built into the hardware of almost all Apple Notebooks. You tap the laptop, and it Smackbook detects the movement and changes desktops; Smack Da Book.

Shadow book uses the ambient light sensor built into the Mac Book Pro to detect the light differences between the left and the right sensor. If you put your had over the left hand side ambient light sensor, the software switches your desktop. Great Stuff!

I installed the last beta of VirtueDesktops (possibly the last build of this software ever, what a shame!) and to my pleasant surprise, I found that I could activate switching of desktops using the motion or ambient light sensors from directly inside the software! Now I didn’t need Shadow book, but take a look at it in action in the video above… I wonder whether Leopard can do that!

The folding@home project is trying to unravel the mysteries of how, proteins, the basic building blocks of our body, fold into various forms so that they can perform a vast multitude of tasks. Simulating this would usually take many years of computer time, or very expensive “super-computing” time.

The folding@home project has effectively harnessed the unused computing power of thousands of desktop computers to solve this problem. The basics are better explained by the experts, so I’ll leave it to them. If you have questions, they have a comprehensive FAQs Listing.

You can be part of this project simply by downloading and installing their client on your Macintosh or Intel PC, or even on the extremely powerful Sony Playstation 3. Interestingly, the Playstation 3 has the most interesting interface of them all!

Giving back to the community has never been simpler, I encourage all of you to do so.

 Update: You’re also invited to Join the Coloursalive team by entering the number 76256 in the folding@home client configuration box. You can also visit the team statistics at any point of time.  Right now, its just me, but you’re invited to the party, to help make those numbers grow.