What You May Not Know
In testing out Spaces, we've uncovered a few tips that should help you get more out of this OS X 10.5 feature.
- You can assign Spaces' Exposé-like overview to a corner of your screen using the Hot Corners button in the Desktop & Screen Saver pane of System Preferences; moving your mouse cursor to that screen corner will then bring up the overview of your workspaces.
- If you use Exposé's All Applications mode while in a workspace, it shows only those windows in the current workspace; however, if you first activate Space's overview and then activate Exposé's All Applications mode, you'll see all windows in all workspaces. You can click on any window to go directly to it. Unfortunately, many windows will be too small to make out in this view.
- If you delete a workspace containing windows, those windows will be moved to the next workspace up (if you delete a row) or to the left (if you delete a column).
- If you disable Spaces, all windows in all spaces will be moved to workspace 1-your actual screen. However, if you later enable Spaces again, only those windows belonging to applications specifically assigned (in System Preferences) to different workspaces will be automatically moved to those workspaces; the rest will remain in workspace 1 until you move them manually.
- Error messages, floating dialogs, and notification displays (for example, Growl notifications and iTunes controllers such as CoverSutra) appear on the active workspace, even if they pertain to an app in a different workspace.
- Launcher utilities, such as LaunchBar, work well with Spaces. For example, LaunchBar's window appears in whichever workspace you're in when you activate LaunchBar; if you open an item that isn't currently open, it opens in the current workspace; if you open an item that's already open in another workspace, Mac OS X automatically switches you to that workspace and brings the chosen item to the front.
- You can consolidate all your windows to a single workspace without disabling Spaces: just press F8 for the birds-eye overview, and then press C; pressing C again will restore the windows to their separate workspaces. (However, once you leave the birds-eye view, you won't be able to restore.)
What We Think
Overall, Spaces works well, and is relatively easy to use given that it's presenting an entirely new way of thinking about your onscreen work area; the fact that it's so well integrated into OS X means that some people who might never have considered using a virtual-desktop manager will end up making it part of their normal workflow. At the very least, it's an appealing alternative to hiding and showing groups of windows to reduce onscreen clutter.
On the other hand, Spaces isn't without its limitations. For example, you can choose to have an application, and all its windows, appear in all workspaces, but you can't do the same with just a particular document window within an application. And perhaps the most significant limitation is that Spaces doesn't automatically remember open programs and windows when you log out; the closest you can get is to assign particular programs to always open in particular workspaces.
Spaces' behavior is also confusing at times, especially as it relates to OS X's Command+Tab application switcher. Similarly, Spaces presents challenges if you have different windows for a particular application open in different workspaces. Finally, when using Spaces, OS X's Command+` shortcut-which should toggle between open windows in the current application-doesn't work properly if those windows are spread between multiple workspaces; it cycles through only the windows open in the current workspace.
Spaces clearly isn't for everyone. It's unlikely to appeal to those who work in just a few applications; for example, if you spend most of your time surfing the Web, working with e-mail, and using a word processor, the benefits of Spaces may not be compelling enough for you to embrace virtual desktops. However, people who use their Macs for many different tasks throughout the day, and who wish there was a better solution to window clutter than Expose, may find Spaces to be just the solution.
Spaces also has benefits for people who use virtualization utilities, such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, to run Windows applications or other operating systems on Intel Macs. For example, you can dedicate a workspace to Windows, or one workspace for each OS you're running, giving you the ability to switch between operating systems with the press of a key.
On the other hand, experienced users already taking advantage of some sort of virtual-desktop manager may find Apple's make-it-simple approach too limiting; third-party managers still offer more features.
Great or Wait? As virtual-desktop managers go, Leopard's Spaces feature is attractive and easy to use. It may not have all the features of more-advanced virtual-desktop systems, but it offers most of the major benefits in a way that makes them accessible to even beginning users. Best of all, you can try Spaces without worrying about messing up your system; if you decide you don't like it, turning it off simply combines your workspaces back into a single screen. So give it a try: you've got nothing to lose except screen clutter. A qualified Great.
Senior editor Dan Frakes reviews low-cost applications in the Mac Gems blog.
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