Leopard – Spaces

Apple’s new operating system, 10.5 or “Leopard,” continues to surprise me. None of the new features is particularly well advertised or explained, but my current favorite has got to be “Spaces.”

I like to keep a lot of windows open and active at the same time. Even with two monitors, it’s a challenge to keep them from getting in the way of each other. If I have five browsers open (I use Firefox, Safari, Camino and IE7 in a Windows environment) along with PhotoShop, Word and a couple of FTP programs all at the same time, I can hardly see the forest for the trees.

That’s where I am finding “Spaces” incredibly useful. Spaces allows you to selectively have some of your open windows hidden, and switch between sets of open windows without having to go through all the others. It’s almost like having four desktops at the same time, and being able to effortlessly switch between them. Here are some screen shots of my normal working environment:

Even with Expose it still looks a mess. Here is an example of “Spaces” where I have placed the windows for each job in to a different desktop. I can now switch between them at the click of a button. The mess becomes much easier to navigate through. Leopard may not be quite ready yet, but this feature is incredible.

It’s not yet completely intuitive either, but I think once I get the hang of it this will be my most used new app.