Thursday, November 02, 2006

Mac X: Virtual desktops

Yesterday by a chance I went to Apple website and I found a sneak peak of Mac X 10.5 (Leopard).
I have to admit that it looks impressive; nevertheless, as far as I am concerned the only thing that I really look forward to is Spaces, or just simply virtual desktops, which by the way is great news.

I think I do not have to explain what virtual desktops are. Everyone who has every used Gnome or KDE in Linux should know it. The only thing I can say is that they are very, very convenient because:

They increase a user's ability to organize their windowed applications that are currently running by reducing clutter. - wikipedia

Lack of virtual desktops systems (free ones of course) on Mac X 10.4 used to annoy me a lot, because I use considerable amount of windowed application everyday at my work. Consequently, few months ago I started to look for some freeware application that provides virtual desktops for Intel iMac with Mac OS X 10.4. Nevertheless, at the time the only free program that I found did not work on Tiger - after starting it, my Mac just freezed. Unfortunately I do not remember the name of that program, or even where did I take it from.

Recently, due to sneak peak of Leopard I decided to give it one more try and to look for some free virtual desktop manager working on Tiger. And for my big surprise I have found it. It is called just Desktop Manager and its official site is here. I downloaded DesktopManager-0.5.3.dmg and I installed it and it worked!!!.

Thanks to this little program now I use six virtual desktop which is great. Finally I can open as many window application and consoles as I want, and I can manage through them very easily.

Bellow some pictures of my Mac and transition between desktops. Sorry for the quality, but I had to use digital camera to take them, because normal screen shots do not work with this.

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