You continues to impress
You Software, the old Extensis guys who are giving the likes of Unsanity a run for their money as one of the coolest little software companies to offer awesome little widgets to make your OS X experience that much better, just released the beta for You Control: Desktops. Having not been too impressed with CodeTek’s VirtualDesktop Pro or the SourceForge Desktop Manager project, I just finished downloading it and I have to say it’s up to You’s fine standards. Simple and elegant. Dragging and dropping between desktops works as expected. They even allow you to keep separate desktop icons & backgrounds for each desktop.
I can’t say that I’m in desperate need of virtual desktops, but I do miss it from my BeOS days and I’m looking forward to playing around with this beta. Although having seen a virtual desktops hack in Tiger at Apple, who’s to say that Apple won’t incorporate the utility to augment Exposé?
I bought CodeTek’s product a long while back, but never used it. Then they upgraded it and it got more expensive, and I just let it go, deleting the obsolete version, since I found that multiple desktops wasn’t that useful to me, with my big-ass monitors I could put everything on one screen and be fine.
But when I moved to a 15″ PowerBook, the screen got a whole lot smaller. And I read a recommendation somewhere for Desktop Manager, which you mention above, and I decided to give it a try.
It took a few weeks of using it regularly, and I had to customize the keystrokes to fit my usage patterns, but I’ve become quite a fan. It’s not quite like having a 20″ monitor, but it sure beats carrying 70 pounds of plastic, glass, and metal around!
Anyway, I’m going to try out You Control: Desktop, but as you say, Tiger could easily have a feature like this, so I’ll definitely be waiting for it before I decide to actually pay for it. Until then, Desktop Manager works pretty well (if fewer bells and whistles), and the price is right (free).
Comment by Alderete — 12/5/2004 @ 10:55 pm