I’m in a good mood today. I have a job interview later this week, the California Golden Bears football team won over the weekend, and I get to write another section of our Leopard review! This is certainly going to end up being the longest article series we’ve written; we’re currently planning for nine or ten sections, so there’s a lot more to cover.

This part covers a feature brand new to Leopard: Spaces.

Here’s the traditional note regarding the score: the score you see at the bottom of this page is for the features discussed in this section only. When all is said and done, we will give Leopard an all-around score.

Anyway, let’s get this party started!

Through space and time

The idea behind Spaces is not new. Spaces is a direct descendant of virtual desktops, which has been a mainstay of UNIX and Linux GUIs (KDE, etc…) for years. If you’re reading this review, I would assume that you at least have an idea of what virtual desktops are, so I won’t describe the concept behind them.

There have been implementations of virtual desktops for Mac OS X before Spaces; in fact, both Pilky and Jay have written about one in particular called Desktop Manager.

I have toyed with Desktop Manager in the past, but I never really got into the idea of virtual desktops. I never saw any way to integrate them into my workflow.

With Spaces, though, I finally decided to give virtual desktops a try. Let’s see how it fared.

There can be some confusion between the feature called “Spaces” (capitalized) and individual virtual desktops called “spaces” (lower-case). To keep things sane, the feature as a whole is referred to as “Spaces” in this review, and each individual desktop is referred to as a “workspace” for our purposes here. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to discern what I am talking about.

Going into space

Spaces is disabled by default, presumably to keep less advanced users from becoming confused when they accidentally hit some keystroke and end up whisked away into another workspace, unable to find their application windows. Also, less advanced users may not find a need for Spaces if all they end up doing is work on one thing at a time. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for the typical power user to end up running ten applications with 20+ open windows at any given time. This is the type of person Spaces is targeted for.

Enabling Spaces is simple enough, however; open System Preferences, click on Exposé and Spaces, click the Spaces tab, and click the “Enable Spaces” checkbox. For those not running Leopard, here’s a screenshot of the Spaces preference pane tab:

You may notice the “Application Assignments” section. I’ll discuss this in detail in a bit.

By default, Spaces creates four workspaces in a 2-by-2 matrix, but it supports up to 16 workspaces (in a 4-by-4 matrix). Somehow, though, I’d imagine working with that many workspaces could end up confusing and disorientating, but if you want 16 workspaces, you can, so go crazy.

Spaces offers a number of ways to switch from workspace to workspace. First of all, there’s the overview mode (screenshot), which is activated by pressing F8 by default, but just as with Exposé, you can change the hotkey to any function key to activate it. Second, you can jump directly to any workspace by pressing control (ctrl) and the number key corresponding to the number assigned to a workspace. This works well up to nine workspaces, provided you can remember the number for the workspace you stuck that friggin’ Pages document in, but after nine, it breaks down since there aren’t any double-digit numeral keys (and no, pressing ctrl-1-0, etc… does not work; I tried). Third, to switch from any workspace to an adjacent workspace, you can use the arrow keys. It’s even possible to move diagonally by holding down the up/down key with the left/right key, but it will pass through one of the adjacent workspaces before taking you where you want to go.

Moving windows between spaces is simple. You can manipulate window locations while in Spaces overview mode (drag any of the miniaturized windows to any workspace you want). Alternately, you can drag the window over to any edge of the screen--corners included--to move the window to the next workspace in that direction (for corners, you will need to hold the window there a little longer to go diagonal; Spaces will move you up one workspace, then over one workspace after a pause). It is not possible, however, to move the mouse to one of the screen edges to jump to another workspace, but I guess that is not practical due to some preexisting features like the Dock, menubar, and hot corners. So it goes.

Lastly, Spaces includes a menubar extra, allowing you to pick a workspace from a menu interface. It’s not the most visual tool, but it’s there if you want it.

Moving between workspaces works pretty well, as does moving windows between workspaces. What if the window you want to move to another workspace is buried under a pile of other windows? No problem, Exposé works in overview mode; press F8 then press F9 to see an overview of all open windows across all workspaces. From there you can click on any window to go to the workspace it resides in and bring the window to the front, or you can drag windows around to other spaces. It’s really quite slick.

Spaces is very flexible. As mentioned before, of course, you can drag windows around between your workspaces as you please, so your workspaces can make as much--or as little--logical sense as you want them to. Spaces goes one step further, however, and allows you to assign applications to particular workspaces. For example, if you want one workspace for internet, one workspace for your calendar, one for word processing, and one for multimedia, you can. You can assign Mail, Safari, and iChat to Space 1; Word to Space 2; iPhoto and iMovie to Space 3; and iCal to Space 4.

You can assign any application to any workspace, or have it follow you around.

On top of that, if there are particular applications you want to use with multiple kinds of tasks, you can assign them to every space and the application will follow you around. I have two applications set to be at my side wherever I go: iChat and Finder. I use one workspace for Mail and Safari, one DT-related work, one for system apps, and one for everything else.

And for those of you who care about such minutiae, the Application Assignments list supports drag-and-drop, so you can drag any app from the Finder into the list. It’s a small but nice touch.

I like the Application Assignments feature, but I would love to see Apple take this one step further. I would love to see project-based assignments, where you can group applications and individual documents into different workspaces based on what project or task they pertain to. Maybe in 10.6?

Drawbacks

As great as Spaces is, that doesn’t mean that it is immune to issues.

Believe it or not, it is possible to lose windows in Spaces! While writing this review I was adding and removing workspaces, and somewhere during the shuffle I managed to lose a Safari window. Safari still recognizes the window’s existence--it shows up in Safari’s Window menu--but...no window! I’m going to assume this is a bug, but I’d like to see a way to collect all windows in one workspace regardless.

Spaces does not allow you to set a different desktop background for each workspace, which would help ease confusion as it would make telling individual workspaces apart much easier.

Lastly, Spaces only goes by number to differentiate individual workspaces. If you want to give your workspaces unique names like “Work,” or “Fun,” or “Photoshop,” you can’t. With four workspaces, this may not be a problem. If you have 16 workspaces, and if you rely on the menubar extra to jump from space to space, you may want those names.

These issues are all fairly minor quibbles, though, and I don’t think they will severely impact Spaces’ usefulness for most users.

Awesome or not-some?

By and large, I like Spaces. I think Spaces is packed full of thoughtful little features and niceties, and provides a little sanity to those out there who have to deal with tons of windows and running applications (a daunting task unless you have multiple monitors, and even then, you may have some trouble tracking everything). How well Spaces works for you is not something I can really comment on, though. Whether Spaces works for you will depend greatly on your workflow and window management style. If you work do heavy multitasking on your machine, I would suggest at least giving Spaces a try. Who knows? You may go from being a virtual desktop skeptic like I once was to a true believer.

Articles in this series

• Part 1: The Leopard UI
• Leopard screenshots
• Part 2: Spotlight and the Finder
• Part 3: Stacks