Keep your desktop clean!
 

This is maybe a bit too small for the Genius Bar but I wasn't finding a better place for it ;)

Who else doesn't know the problem that the desktop gets full, after taking snapshots, dragging web gfx to the desktop or quick downloads. An temporary way to get rid of that stuff is to create a folder on the desktop, but it can happen that you delete this folder by accident while cleaning the desktop - this happend once to me, the only time I had data loss since I was using OS X. Protecting a folder won't work because you can't drag any files onto it anymore.

So I used a different way, it is very simple. I created a folder Temporary/Desktop Storage in my home folder. After this I created an Alias to my desktop. This Alias also can be protected, but because the target folder isn't protected you can still drag files onto it. So neither the Alias nor the desktop storage folder can be deleted accidentally.

You can download my customized Desktop Storage folder in this .dmg. I used some icons and added some sub-folders for a quick sortation. The folders are beginning with spaces and the centered point • so that they will stay always at first place (if you sort by name). So it's possible to drag all the stuff into the folder and sort it later without loosing overview.