I’ve got one of the weirdest and head-bendy tool reviews for you today. Let’s see if I can set up a problem to be solved to get you interested first.
The Problem to be Solved
Let’s say you’re doing a presentation and you need to share your screen. This causes a few challenges, especially if you have a messy desktop. You could use something like Presentation Mode in Parallels Toolbox which hides all of your desktop icons, which is what I’ve traditionally done.
What if you want your desktop wallpaper to be something more bland than the F1 race car you currently use? That’s another thing you have to change and put back.
Another problem I have in doing presentations, especially for Mac user groups, is that people are often watching from low-resolution screens. Many watch on iPads. This means for them to read anything on my screen, I need to lower the resolution of my own screen. That’s easy enough to do, but even if I’m only sharing one app, it means I can’t see anything else on screen like my own notes.
Maybe you don’t do presentations, but you need to be able to take screenshots of the entire screen where nothing else is showing.
What if you had a dedicated display that you could set to low resolution and choose not to show any desktop items and define the wallpaper of your choosing? Enter the open source Swift app called DeskPad by Bastian Andelefski. I first heard about DeskPad as a Cool Stuff Found by Randy Walker on Mac Geek Gab #1077.
DeskPad creates a virtual display on your Mac that acts just like a real display. You can customize the resolution and the wallpaper and do your presentation from there. Let’s install it and see how it works, shall we?
Installation
Bastian has released DeskPad on GitHub under his user name Stengo. GitHub might sound intimidating and only for geeks, but I promise it’s super easy to download and install. Following the link in the shownotes, you’ll see many unfamiliar tabs across the top. You’ll see tabs for Code, Issues, Pull Requests, and more. You’ll see all kinds of undefined icons and words like “forks”. Even more baffling, you’ll see a list of code items with names like .gitignore.
If you scroll down a bit though, you’ll see a section called README and that’s in plain English with pretty pictures. You don’t need to look at this part but it might make you feel more calm about where I’ve taken you to.
On the right side there’s a column of options and I want you to look for Releases and click on where it says “Latest”. This will take you to a simpler page where you’ll see a list of Assets. There will be three zip files to choose from for download. You do not want either of the source code zip files unless you’re a developer. You want to download DeskPad.app.zip.
From here on out, this will be just like any other app you download from the Internet. Open up the zip and move the app into your Applications folder.
Using DeskPad
On first launch you’ll get that annoying popup about an app introduced in macOS Sequoia requesting to bypass the system private window picker that you have to allow.
As soon as you choose allow, you’ll see a floating window that is our new virtual display. Yay! Except that the resolution of this virtual display is wicked high. You may not even be able to read the text of the menu bar.
Let’s fix that straight away. Open System Settings → Displays and you’ll see that you now have an extra display called “DeskPad Display”. With it selected, you’ll see the list of resolutions. By default, the DeskPad Display is set to 3360 x 2100! That’s a wee bit high for me to view on my 13″ MacBook Air.
Below the list of resolutions you’ll see a toggle to “Show all resolutions”. I recommend scrolling down to the bottom of the list to see the HiDPI options. I choose something super low like 1280 x 800 (HiDPI). That allows the DeskPad virtual display to float nicely on my little display and let me see other things around the window. Choose whatever resolution fits your needs.
Now that the screen has reasonable resolution, let’s change the wallpaper. In System Settings → Wallpaper, toggle off “Show on all Spaces” if it was on. This will allow you to use a dropdown to change displays and apply a different wallpaper to the virtual display.
The final thing to change, and this is where things get a bit head-bendy, is the location of the virtual display. I know that makes no sense because you can see it sitting front and center on your display, but as a display, your cursor needs to know where it is. Is it above your built-in display? To the right/left or bottom?
Just like with a physical display, head back to Displays and select the “Arrange Displays” button and move it to a position relative to your main display. It doesn’t matter where you put it, your brain will still have to adjust to thinking of it to the right/left/top/bottom when your eyes can see that it’s right in the center. I never have a physical display above my main display so I’ve chosen that location for my virtual DeskPad display.
The changes you make in Displays settings for resolution, wallpaper, and location are all maintained when you quit and restart DeskPad.
Usage
Now that we have our virtual display set up to our liking, let’s talk a little bit about what it’s like to use. Picture this. You have your Mac desktop littered with icons for files you really do intend to clean up or use in some way.
Maybe you’re like me and you maintain some sanity for all the apps you have open by using Stage Manager. That gives you piles of app windows on the left. But in the middle of the screen, you have one beautiful Finder window of DeskPad with its pristine desktop with no clutter.
For simplicity’s sake, as I describe usage of DeskPad, I’m going to do all of my examples assuming you have arranged the DeskPad display above your main display. That will save me from having to say top/bottom/left/right every time.
Getting in and out of the display
There are two ways to get your cursor into this virtual display but only one way to get out. When DeskPad is just an app floating on your screen, the top bar of the window will be white. With DeskPad in the foreground, if you move your cursor over the window and click once, the top bar will turn blue. You’re now on that display as though you’ve dragged your cursor into it.
The other way you can get into the display is to drag your cursor upwards. Now here’s where it gets head bendy. As you drag up, the cursor appears at the bottom of the floating display window. It makes sense, right? If that display was really above the physical display, the cursor would appear at the bottom as you drag up into it. But visually this feels very weird. I picture a loop because I drag up but then it’s down again as though it came around the back of my display. Very hard to describe.
Clicking to get into the virtual display is easy, but the only way to get back out is to drag down to the bottom of the virtual display and then it will appear at the top of my physical display.
Where’s my mouse?
There’s a “fun” side effect of this. You can easily lose track of where your cursor is. Imagine you’ve got your cursor in the virtual display, and then you use command-tab to switch apps on your Mac. The new app doesn’t show inside that virtual display, it shows on your main display because you haven’t moved the app up there.
Now you’ve got an app up in front of you and DeskPad is probably covered up or gone into a Stage Manager stack. You have no visible cursor, because it’s still on that other display! The good news is you don’t have to command-tab back to DeskPad to get to it. You simply have to drag down on your mouse or trackpad and it will magically slide down from the top of the screen. I know this intellectually, but I still find myself a bit baffled on where my mouse is when it happens.
Moving windows into the virtual display
Now that you’ve practiced getting your cursor in and out of this head-bendy virtual display, you’re fully armed with how to move app windows into the display. Just as with a physical display, simply slide the app up to the top of your main display until the app disappears and comes up from the bottom on the virtual display. This sounds obvious as you’re picturing it in your mind but I assure you it’s very weird in real life.
It’s so weird I couldn’t even figure out how to take a screenshot of it happening. I decided to do a screen recording instead. In the video, you’ll see on my screen DeskPad, System Settings, and Mona, my Mastodon client. I’ll show you in System Settings → Displays how I have DeskPad arranged above my main display. Then I’ll show you how if I drag my cursor to the top of my main display, my cursor arrives at the bottom of the DeskPad display.
Then I’ll drag back down until my cursor comes onto the main screen. Next I’ll drag Mona straight up, and eventually you’ll see the Mona windows leaving the top of my main screen while at the same time sliding up into the DeskPad virtual display. If you’re not looking at it, that sounds normal but when you see that the DeskPad display is on the main display, that’s what makes it weird.
Bottom Line
I’m not sure what the bottom line is about DeskPad. It might be useful for the demo case I gave at the beginning, but it might also be too weird for you. Github may be a bit intimidating to you but maybe following these directions for such an easy install will help you start to become more familiar with GitHub. I’m not sure I’ll use DeskPad but I’m sure I enjoyed the heck out of learning how to use it and stretching my brain a little.