Screen real estate
If you use computers at work, or even just at home, you’ll be constantly minimising, maximising and generally moving windows about to get at whatever you want to be working on.
Even though I have got 2 screens on my computer, and can open up lots of windows and spread them about a bit, I still get frustrated with not having enough room to work. I’m generally working on lots of different things at once, often for many different clients at the same time. That’s on top of all the normal crap I have open, like the BBC radio player, Skype, email and other apps.
That’s where Spaces comes in. It’s a new feature in Mac’s OSX Leopard release. In essence it allows you to create multiple desktops and flick easily between them. So for instance, lets say I am working for a particular client and one of my other clients asks me to do some emergency quick fix. Instead of closing down everything on my screen and having to reopen it all when I’m done I can just create a new space, do the work in that one, and when I’ve finished everything is still set up for me to quickly go back to what I was doing before. It does take a while to get used to, but it’s proving to be the most useful new thing I’ve started using in years.
No idea what I’m talking about? Watch this vid, then. It’s the slickety slick Apple explanation of what Spaces is.