Freeware February: Virtue desktop manager

A couple of you mentioned Virtue as an alternative to Desktop Manager, which I featured as one of last week’s Freeware February picks, and now I must happily share the virtues of Virtue with you all. If you liked Desktop Manager, you’ll love Virtue, which basically picks up where Desktop Manager was left to languish by developers who got too busy with other projects. Enter the beauty of open source software: another developer was able to take a great product that would otherwise die and add new, cool functionality to it. Take that, Bill Gates.

Anywho, Virtue is just slick, slick, slick. The semi-transparent desktop pager window is all aglow with Aqua gooey goodness. Sometimes I call it up when I don’t even need to switch to anything, just to look at it. Virtue also solves one of the main beefs I had with Desktop Manager, which is that, when using apple-tab to switch between applications, Virtue will automagically switch to the proper desktop to bring that application into focus, whereas Desktop Manager would not. This alone is a life-saver.

Run, don’t walk. This is a killer app. And - we know you get it by now but it just bears repeating - it’s FREE! :)