For the second part of this series I wanted to discuss the new feature called Spaces. Having been working on the developers version of Leopard for the last month I’ve gotten a pretty good taste of what it has to offer. I’ve particularly enjoyed this feature for work related uses. For those that are unfamiliar with what spaces offers, it allows you to assign “spaces” (for the lack of a better word) for specific applications. Think of it as separate desktop’s for those certain apps you may often use together. If you like keeping your work area organized and clutter free, you’ll definitely enjoy this new feature.

Spaces is pretty customizable in that you can add up to eight rows and eight columns when choosing your number of work spaces. After determining the quantity of spaces ideal for your work habits you can assign your favorite apps to specific spaces. For example, I’m currently running four work spaces that are optimized for my current work habits as follows:

Space 1: Adium, Safari, Ecto, Mail, CyberDuck and Newsfire
Space 2: VM Ware Fusion w/ Vista and Firefox
Space 3: Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office for Mac
Space 4: Acquisition and Azureus

Spaces also lets you customize the keys for navigating between spaces. I currently use the option key with the left and right arrows to move from space to space quickly. As I’ve customized my spaces for different types of work habits and tasks I’ve still found myself dragging apps from one space to another within the “birds-eye” view. This view fills your display with each space in its own quadrant. From there, you can drag apps from space to space as you choose. As you re-open those apps in the future they’ll simply open in the original defined space you had set within the preferences pane.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using spaces thus far as I tend to have a lot of things going on within my screen at once, even with my recent purchase of the Dell 30″ display. If you don’t plan on upgrading to Leopard right away there are alternatives out there such as VirtueDesktops. This app will essentially give you a similar experience as Spaces in that you can customize a number of work spaces that replicate seperate desktop areas. I’ve had friends that have tested spaces on my machine and still prefer VirtueDesktops as they like the transition effects from one space to another. It really has a lot to do with personal preference but at the end of the day I believe the new Spaces will be the crowd pleaser when comparing the two.

Do you think Spaces is something you’ll utilize? Are you already using VirtueDesktops? If so, will you make the switch?

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 5:30 am and is filed under Apple, How-To, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.