Leopard Report: Spaces

I promised more news as I had time to play with the deeper features. I have now set up spaces and I think it will be a real boon to those of us who regularly have lots of apps and windows open. Especially on machines with a single monitor (e.g., MacBook). A few points:

  1. You can set up numerous “spaces.” These are a bit like different desktops that you can assign different functions or work groups.
  2. You can assign apps to load in specific spaces. So, for example, I have 4 spaces set up. In #1 I have Safari and Entourage. Any time they load, they load into Space 1. In #2 I have MarsEdit and NetNewsWire. In #3 I have NisusWriter (which has a beta you must download for Leopard, see here). And in #4 I have Accordance (which also has a minor update for Leopard).
  3. Using F8 you can quickly see your spaces and you can even drag windows from one space to another:

  4. Even better, while in this F8 mode, you can invoke Exposé to see all the windows in each space:

  5. You can move from one app to the other in the same ways as always: choose from the Dock, cmd-tab, but now you also can use ctrl-number to select a space (e.g., ctrl-4 for my Accordance workspace), ctrl-arrow, or use the menu bar drop down.

All in all, this is a great organizing and therefore time saving feature for me. As Leo Laporte mentioned on his blog, others have made such programs for the Mac and Windows (and I had tried them all on the Mac), but Apple has integrated it so well it works seamlessly.

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