Filed under: Leopard
24 hours of Leopard: Spaces
Feature: Spaces
How it works: Enable Spaces by clicking its icon in the Dock, then create as many different desktops as you want and fill them with the apps you need to have open-- one for work, another for personal stuff, a third for miscellaneous. Or maybe one workspace for communication where you'll park Mail.app, Twitter, Facebook, and Adium; and another space to hold the things you need for the Keynote presentation you're working on: iPhoto, Text Edit, and Skitch.
Switch easily from one workspace to another with the arrow keys, drag and drop apps from one workspace to another, add more Spaces, and assign apps to always open in a specific Space. There are tons of ways to make Spaces work for you and make your desktop, er, desktops look and behave just the way you want.
Who will use it: Multi-taskers and people who like to have dozens of apps open at once.
You can check out all our 24 Hours of Leopard posts here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Carlos said 11:05PM on 10-25-2007
I NEED Spaces!!!!
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myheaditches said 11:06PM on 10-25-2007
Can you have a fullscreen application, such as World of Warcraft, open in one workspace, and be able to move to other workspaces?
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Phil said 11:05PM on 10-25-2007
This is going to be one of the most useful tools in Leopard. Can't wait!!!
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miker said 11:27PM on 10-25-2007
Hot damn, I wasn't real interested in upgrading, but that's one of my required functions and the one which made moving from linux to osx difficult.
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JJ Forde said 11:36PM on 10-25-2007
Does anyone know if you can have an app in multiple spaces. I would love to be able to have iChat across a few at a time.
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Dan Parmelee said 11:36PM on 10-25-2007
So does the dock show only the applications that are running in that Space, or all Spaces combined?
Basically, is the dock shared among all Spaces?
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Carlos said 12:00AM on 10-26-2007
#5 Spaces is application driven so all your iChat windows will be in a single space.
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punkassjim said 12:03AM on 10-26-2007
I've become totally addicted to DesktopManager since it gained fame with the smackbook thing a while back. Can't live without it now. But the one thing that'll kill Spaces for me is if the prefs don't allow arbitrary keyboard shorcuts, both for switching spaces, and for moving a window into a neighboring space, direction depending on key combo. It's nice to be able to do that with the mouse, but it'll never a time-saver if that's the only way to so certain things.
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punkassjim said 12:08AM on 10-26-2007
and if that's true, and you can't have windows from one app spread among spaces, that'll be a big detractor.
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Rhywun said 12:29AM on 10-26-2007
@5: I read that you can choose to have an app in one space or in all of them simultaneously.
@6: I read that the dock is shared among all spaces.
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Rafe H. said 12:52AM on 10-26-2007
@8 and @9: Agreed. Desktop Manager is the greatest. If spaces has no keyboard shortcuts, and if I can't have Terminal and Safari windows spread amongst desktops, then Spaces is of little use.
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required said 1:26AM on 10-26-2007
This concept is quite old, the Solaris OS has had it for ages. I even had an extension in OS8 that did this. Oh well in many ways what is old is new again and when you pay for it again it's that much better right?
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bobm said 1:35AM on 10-26-2007
As a long time VirtueDesktop users I'm wondering if spaces will allow either a hot-edge or key combo to switch screens.
Here is what I do:
Click on the upper and right edges to switch in that direction.
Alt down and left to switch in that direction.
the logic here is that if I'm on the keyboard I can swtich easily and if I'm on the mouse again it's easy to switch desktops.
Can anyone verify that Spaces works that way? (I can't afford it till next month sadly ).
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J. Prevost said 2:25AM on 10-26-2007
I've used third-party apps for this for a while (VirtueDesktops, recently). Having it as a core OS feature will be fabulous, because it will mean that the OS really knows which apps are where. (With the third-party tools, there are always a few weird interactions.)
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TH said 3:30AM on 10-26-2007
@8. Spaces can be switched by pressing F8 to show a tiny version all at once (like Expose with F9), or by pressing ctrl + number keys (jumps straight to that space) or ctrl + arrow keys to cycle through the spaces. F8 can be changed to any other F-key, and the modifier keys can be switched (shift, ctrl, option, command) but you can't change the arrow or number keys to something else.
@9. You can spread out an application's windows to be in several different spaces but each window can't overlap multiple spaces.
The Dock is in all spaces. Clicking an active icon will rotate jump to the space containing that window, or cycle through the spaces if the application has windows in multiple spaces.
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Rob said 8:58AM on 10-26-2007
Another Apple ripoff from the Linux / Unix world. But I am glad they did it.
P.S. you can add this feature to tiger for free using apps like Virtue. You do not need Leopard.
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badtzmaru said 2:24AM on 10-27-2007
OK I enabled Spaces. But the Spaces icon is not appearing in my Dock. What gives? I loved playing with this feature at the store and now I can't get the icon to show up. I can get the icon to appear in my menu bar but not on the Dock!
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pervel said 4:39AM on 10-27-2007
Unfortunately, you can NOT show fullscreen applications in the overview of your spaces. I have tested that with World of Warcraft which simply shows a blank desktop in the overview. Quite sad indeed. It would be interesting to know if this is a limitation in Spaces or in the game.
I have a feeling it may be a limitation in Spaces because if you view a movie with QuickTime in fullscreen and switch to Spaces overview, QuickTime will exit fullscreen. That's a major inconvenience in my opinion and something I hope Apple will improve.
Switching between desktops using hotkeys does seem to work. However, fullscreen games tend to capture all keyboard input including the highest level OS keyboard shortcuts. Thus, this is also problematic.
Spaces are great overall. But it appears it still needs some tweaking to be really useful for all purposes. Some of that tweaking may be up to third-party developers, but I think some of it needs to be better thought out by Apple.
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sjk said 5:03PM on 10-27-2007
Re: But the one thing that'll kill Spaces for me is if the prefs don't allow arbitrary keyboard shorcuts, both for switching spaces, and for moving a window into a neighboring space
If there's a keyboard shortcut for moving windows between spaces it wasn't obvious when I tried Spaces during the Leopard launch at the Apple Store.
Re: As a long time VirtueDesktop users I'm wondering if spaces will allow either a hot-edge or key combo to switch screens.
I didn't check for the former; TH already described the latter. Dragging a window from one space to another triggers a switch to the destination space if you're in the regular view but not in the bird's-eye view. And other things will trigger space switching whether you like it or not. I couldn't find a way to make an app active without auto-switching to its "last-known" space.
Also noticed that Finder can have lower priority than other apps in a space. Say you've got a Safari window open in a space, click the desktop background to activate Finder, then switch to a different space. When you return to the original space Safari will be the foreground app. Leaving an open Finder window in the original space probably forces Finder to remain the foreground app if it is when when you switch to a different space and back.
In some contexts it's possible to open windows for an app in one space from an app in another space without switching to the first app's space. For instance, if Mail is in space 1 and Safari is in space 2 a command-click on a link in a Mail message will open a Safari window in its space without switching. I'd like more control over opening windows in a "background space" that way to avoid auto-switching, sort of analogous to opening background browser windows/tabs.
The bird's-eye view in Spaces is much nicer than the VirtueDesktops desktop overlay pager, both visually and because you can easily shuffle windows (and spaces) around in it. Big problem I have with VD is when I bind an app to a desktop any windows I want to keep open on other desktops will jump back to the bound desktop. Spaces seems to behave better when windows for an app are open in multiple spaces, with the downside of being auto-switched to one of those spaces when you may not want to be. I prefer the control and predictability of explicit switching so it'll take some time to figure out and get comfortable with Spaces auto-switching. But that won't happen right away since I'm not over-anxious to upgrade to Leopard based on how many relatively significant problems (e.g. multiple Mail crashes) I uncovered in about two hours of tinkering on the pristine setup at the Apple Store last night. Describing those in more detail is another topic …
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Michael Long said 7:53AM on 11-08-2007
@sjk, the key to making the best use of Spaces doesn't lie in command-key assignments, but in setting up the proper adjacencies between applications. That's best described here...
http://www.iSights.org/2007/11/confessions-of-.html
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