Exposing Spaces
Talking about workflow the other day got me to thinking just how overpopulated my computer desktop had become. Blogging, writing, scripting, radio recording, telepromptering (that’s a word, right?), plus my iTunes and Handbrake obsessions. But Mac’s Exposé feature seemed all right — press a button or gesture on the multitouch mouse, and all your open windows splay out. Click the one you need and you’re ready to rock and roll.
But that’s not the way we work, is it? You’re still doing an awful lot of hunting, and the more windows you have open (I can have tons and tons of browser windows open at any one time, and, yes, I use tabs), the smaller and less readable those Exposé thumbnails become. So I figured I’d try this Spaces thing and see how it works.
If you don’t know, Spaces (and I assume Windows already has something similar, and if not MS will copy it soon enough) lets you maintain multiple virtual desktops — up to 16 at one time. And it’s a surprisingly deep program in that Apple way. The ways the Mac team has developed for you to maintain and navigate all that information is a joy to use and a constant “ooh, pretty!” to discover.
But it’s not finished yet. I’ve got the full 16 desktops going, and I use them all, each one dedicated to a particular app or activity. When you’ve got all that to manage, you need some better cues as to what’s where.
So, Apple, please — let us give each desktop a name. The name only needs to show up when we do the Spaces click, but we do need the ability. And we should be able to give each desktop its own wallpaper. Something photo-y for my Aperture desktop, something graph-y for my spreadsheet space, etc. Again, that would go a long way toward helping me think less about how to do my job, and spend more time actually doing my job.
Or… more time playing Hearts of Iron III. Whatever. Get off my case. I’m getting work done, I swear.
Steve, what you want is Hyperspaces.
As always, Charlie, you rock.
Just installed this Sysinternals Windows Virtual Desktop thingie. I never tried this stuff. I got used to just Alt-Tabbing. Time for some experimenting…
Responding to your tweet…
I’ve used virtual desktops on linux. Seems most of the session managers have them and have for years. Microsoft is very late getting into this game.
When I needed to use Windows at work, I experimented with a few virtual desktop applications. One of them was the result of someone inside Microsoft trying to learn things about the session manager. It barely worked. I tried a couple of others until I finally found one that was pretty good. I can’t remember which one it was but it might have been Hyperspaces. It still had some bugs but was mostly usable.
The only thing I can think of to improve Spaces on the Mac would be finding an easier way to move windows from one space to another. Some of the linux virtual desktop implementations act as if the adjacent spaces were actually just off the screen so if you drag a window off the edge of the screen it appears on the next desktop. Also, some Spaces options on the window menu might be nice. KDE on linux allows me to move a window to another desktop from the window menu.
I’ve always worked with multiple apps on the same desktop, so I didn’t take to spaces right away. I finally gave it a shot, though, and I came up with a very good arrangement of 4 desktops while working:
1) Mail (usually hidden), iCal (usually hidden), Safari
2) Pages, relevant Finder windows, Keynote
3) LessonView (App for textbook for the 8th Grade math course I teach)
4) LaTeXiT, Easy Grade Pro
iTunes and a few others are open in all spaces. I ctrl-arrow or command-tab to jump between spaces and apps. It gives me a very nice combination of everything in front of me and everything separated.
My suggestion would be to see if you can compress your workflow into fewer spaces. If you’re using fewer spaces, you might be able to simply memorize which space contains each set of tasks, and be able to navigate quicker.
Obi –
I started with the default four Spaces, then bumped it up to 12, then 16. I have the feeling that as I get better organized, I’ll reduce the… “spacecount”? Anyway, for now I’m enjoying the maxed-out workspaces and don’t have any trouble navigating.
But I’m certainly going to take Charlie Martin’s suggestion (*always* a good idea) and try out Hyperspace.
Well, Thomas beat me to it. Difficult not to gloat about it, since I’ve been using multiple desktops on Linux for over 10 years. Quoting from the Fvwm manpage:
I recommend a combination of Hyperspaces and Jtouch, which allows you to assign custom gestures and even gives you some very useful pre-configured ones. Jtouch has some very nice gestures for switching spaces, and I configure “three fingers swipe up” to activate the Hyperspaces launcher which shows a map of all my spaces and their names (I also use 16 spaces). This creates a very efficient and also very satisfying workflow.
Hope this helps.
I haven’t used Hyperspaces, so it may include this, but there’s a small program called Warp http://www.ksuther.com/warp/ that lets you move between Spaces by bumping your cursor against the edge of the screen.