New Mac OS X pick of the moment July 4th

Being an occasional user of Codetek Virtual Desktop I was playing with a different toy while on the plane to a meeting in Las Vegas last week. In this blurb, I’m dealing with Desktop Manager by Richard Wareham. Although his project appears to have suffered from a dramatically slowed down development pace it still is a viable (and free) alternative for implementing virtual desktops.

Update (04/07): There’s a pretty decent interview with Richard Wareham over at DrunkenBlog

1. Desktop Manager

Desktop Manager is a free alternative to the aforementioned Codetek Product. It has almost everything you’d want for a virtual desktop manager, except sticky bindings of applications to specific desktops (which I’d love to see in a future version, hint hint). For still being in its pre-1.0 days it’s been pretty stable for me so far.

It supports switching using directly bound-to-desktop hotkeys, mouse movement to the screencorner or clicking the desired virtual desktop in the desktop- or menubar pager. Both pagers contain the icons for each application that resides on those desktops to quickly be able to tell what is buried where.

For a little eye candy, Desktop Manager supports all those nifty transition effects you came to know and love with Apple’s Keynote. Having cube animations during your desktop flips can be a real joy for a while (until you either get seasick or lose too much time while being productive).

Despite loving Expose these virtual desktop managers come in handy from time to time. While working on my Powerbook I constantly run out of desktop space and there’s situations where you just need a rather explicitely arranged setup of windows from different applications sitting next to each other. Since Expose is of no help here, just hit a key combination and hop to a different desktop with ease.

You can see where you are in your virtual desktop world by either looking at the red-bordered desktop in the pager or by setting appropriate names for your desktops which are then displayed in a screen corner. In addition, Desktop Manager gives visual feedback when switching desktops.

I’d say give this a try if you’re looking for a simple and free way to trade in your crowded screen space for a few organized virtual ones.

Although Desktop Manager is basically free, future development can be funded by donating through Paypal.