Desktop Manager for Panther

A big thank-you to the folks who wrote my most essential OSX utility, Desktop Manager.

I can now no longer use a computer unless the windowing system has some kind of facility for managing multiple desktops. It’s just the way I organize my work: I leave my e-mail client on one, ssh shells to various servers on others. Each project I’m working on has its own desktop. When I switch contexts, I switch desktops. When I come back, my work is still there, all laid out as I left it.

Now some folks think Expose on Panther does all this, but it doesn’t. Expose is great for finding buried windows and bringing them to the top, but when I work on a project, I typically have two, three, or four windows all in play at once. I’ll have a couple of Emacs windows, a shell for entering commands (I still prefer a real shell over Emacs shells), and possibly a window tailing a log file. When I’m working on book stuff, I’ll also have a PDF viewer, OmniGraffle, and ImageConvertor lying around. Expose doesn’t help with these: these windows form a working set, and so far the best way I’ve found of swapping them all in and out is with multiple desktops.

With OSX 10.1 and 10.2 I used CodeTek VirtualDesktop, a wonderful utility that let me switch back and forth between any number of desktops. However, when I got Panther, the old virtual desktop didn’t work so well. CodeTek knew this, and instituted a program to support Panther. As an existing customer, I was in their beta program, and the product seemed to be coming along fine. However, their plan to charge existing customers for the upgrade to support Panther rankled somewhat.

Then I discovered Desktop Manager, an open source project that implemented desktops for OSX. And it’s wonderful. It still hasn’t quite got the features of Virtual Desktop (please, please, I need sticky windows for iChat…), but in many ways it’s better. It handles applications popping up windows more intuitively, and it has some very cool desktop switching transitions.

I recently gave my Naked Objects talk, during which I stop the slide show and bring up a naked objects application. CodeTek’s product never seemed to be able to switch desktops when a presentation was in full-screen mode. Desktop Manager handles it like a champ (and the rotating cube transition between the show and the running naked objects app blew folks away :).

So, this is just a long, round-about way of saying a big thank you to Richard Wareham and everyone else who’ve contributed to making my life better.