When I first got my old MacBook, I wanted to use every feature of Leopard that I could. Problem was, my 13-inch MacBook wasn’t able to handle some of the more advanced features such as Spaces, because of it’s integrated video card. Once I turned off Spaces, I promptly forgot about it until recently when a problem presented itself.
Right now, I have several programs open: iChat, Chrome, Safari, Daylite, iCal, Mail, Numbers, Excel, Things, Photoshop, Remote Desktop, and DVD Player. That’s right, I’m taxing my processor pretty hard right now, and that’s not even counting the programs running in the background. Even with my two-monitor setup, it’s still difficult to juggle that many things at once, and I struggled to find a solution. That’s when I remembered about Spaces and turned it on.
Although Spaces is a great option, it’s not perfect. One annoying thing about Spaces is that you can’t customize the individual desktops. That’s where Hyperspaces comes in. The program costs $12.95, and for that you can change and configure each desktop to suit your own needs. You can label them as well, so if you forget which program goes where, you can put in a visual reminder. Or, you can program Hyperspaces to open programs only in certain Spaces.
But what makes this even cooler is the ability to add more spaces to your desktop. You can have up to 16 spaces total, which seems a bit excessive to me, but maybe it’s perfect for you. On my side of things, I’ve now got my four spaces worked out just perfectly, with one for each of my tasks. There’s a free download too, which lets you customize three out of four spaces, so you can at least try it out to see if you like it. I did that for a bit myself, but then I went ahead and bought a copy because I liked it that much. Give it a shot, maybe you will too.
