I've been searching for something like this, but nothing immediately similar has come up.
My desktop picture is of two dragons fighting. Now, I reckon it would be pretty easy to get rid of all the desktop icons and 'hide' them, so to speak, within the picture. How I hide them would be by making them invisible to the human eye (but not to the computer. Sorry, just trying to assemble my already addled brain into something coherant), and when the mouse goes over them, a little icon would show when the cursor has passed over it.
To make this easier for my forgetful juvenile mind is that I put them in certain places on the computer, like the dragon's nose could be MS Word, and the tail could be where all my pictures are, etc.
I suppose that when you change the image you could have a sort of 'mapping' thing, where you pick new places for the hidden icons to go.
They could also be marked out by tiny, descreet black dots or something like that.-- froglet, Jul 22 2005 Mystery meat navigation http://en.wikipedia...ery_meat_navigationa term […] to describe user interfaces […] in which it is inordinately difficult for users […] to determine where the hyperlinks are [erlehmann, Dec 15 2008] I have something like this on my website - a couple of links (for HB stuff and family stuff) hidden in the decoration. Still a bit ambivalent about them - they're still new and I'm not srue how well they work. Really not sure how it would work on a desktop. I suspect I'd lose stuff.
I'm sure there must be excellent examples of this sort of thing on the web. Somewhere.
sp: "coherant" is presumably some new mix of 'coherent' and 'rant'. Which would work well, I think.-- moomintroll, Jul 22 2005 Tie this into the tactile-feedback mouse (Logitech do one) which vibrates as it passes over icons.-- moomintroll, Jul 22 2005 Sorry to disappoint [moomintroll], I meant 'coherent', except I've got exceptionally bad spelling when it comes to everyday words...
But still, 'coherant'... You'd do well to put it up somewhere, I reckon.-- froglet, Jul 22 2005 You could take moomintroll's web page and set it up as your "active desktop" and get your easter-egg links that way...
I like this idea, gives you a nice clean desktop that's still functional. [+]-- junglefish, Jul 23 2005 Use javascript to create onmouseover icons. They would be invisible normally, but would appear when the cursor is over them. Maybe have it highlight a section of the image.-- Aq_Bi, Jul 23 2005 Baked, my me, a few years ago. Me and some work colleagues decided that for a laugh, it might be fun to create a windows desktop with no icons and simply a hilarious pornographic image as the background. Clicking on various areas of the image (I'm sure you can imagine) would open notepad, word etc. Done simply using 'Active Desktop' to show a web page as the background, which used html image maps to create the 'hot spots'. Then just select 'hide desktop icons' and bobs your uncle.-- HowardMarks, Jul 24 2005 sp: boobs-- po, Jul 24 2005 random, halfbakery