What Leopard’s Spaces means for VirtueDesktops future
12 08 2006Hey guys, I’ve had a number of people asking me what impact the Apple’s Spaces announcement at WWDC this year is going to have on VirtueDesktops. Basically, for the near future — not much. Leopard is not due out until sometime in Spring, 2007 - that’s likely to be well over a year from now, and I for one am still going to use virtual desktops in that time. I have a semi-major update to the source tree coming in the next week or so based upon a whole slew of fixes and advice I received from friends and peers at the conference this year, including a big one: VirtueDesktops is now a single Xcode project (yes, you heard me right - mere mortals should now be able to compile and contribute to the VirtueDesktops codebase). Changing the codebase in the manner I have means that it’s time to tag the current, broken tree and push my new work into trunk.
Beyond the release of Leopard, I’m not really sure what I intend to do - everyone I ran into at WWDC asked me my plans. I can’t say very much about the technical side of things (everything except the Keynote at WWDC is covered by a non-disclosure agreement), but it appears from an early glance that there may still be a place for a tool like VirtueDesktops.
Personally, having used Apple’s Spaces, I am very impressed - it is very well implemented, addresses many of the current usability issues that seem inherent to existing desktop management tools and it looks slick to boot 
With Spaces only being for Leopard, it’s great that VirtueDesktops provides a wonderful virtual-desktop solution for Tiger, and will continue to be provided.
I just wanted to say that your work here is very much appreciated. I do love Spaces and think its integration is key (along with the smoothness), but I do not feel that takes away from VirtueDesktops. I hope you will be able to take this next year to expand upon what you have done here.
[…] Nachdem der Desktopmanager nicht mehr weiterentwicklet wird, hat sich mit VirtueDesktops ein echter Geheimtipp mit erstaunlicher Qualität und hohem Maß an Innovation entwickelt… Nun kommt Steve und spendiert dem Leoparden einen Desktop-Manager mit dem Namen Spaces - Room for everything. Ob sich das tapfere VirtueDesktops dann noch gegen die von Apple abgesegnete Lösung wird durchsetzen können - oder ob ihm hier der Raum zur Weiterentwicklung genommen wird? Ich fürchte letzteres aber lest selbst, was der Autor von VirtueDesktops über Apples Konkurenz schreibt. […]