VirtueDesktops » News

VirtueDesktops: the end for now

Tony Arnold — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:42:37 +0000

I’ve been sitting on a fairly big decision (for me) for the last few weeks. The writing has been on the wall for VirtueDesktops since last year’s WWDC, and I had intended to release a nice, stable version for 10.4 users before I stopped work on the project.

I’ve decided not to finish that version.

Needless to say, it wasn’t easy to make this call - I’ve loved working on Virtue, and I think it has some features that Spaces won’t match. The sad fact is, that since June last year, it has all been effort poured into a product that has no future.

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Beta version of VirtueDesktops available to (not so) adventurous souls

Tony Arnold — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:12:11 +0000

I don’t normally hold off on pushing builds via auto-update, but I want to make sure I take care of as many issues with the next build as I can, so I’ve released a beta version in the forums.

The builds available there significantly enhance the existing builds of VirtueDesktops, and fix more bugs than I care to note. If you have issues with any of the previously released versions, you should give the beta a go.

You can download the build from the forums, but be sure to read the release notes before installing. With these builds, you have the option of discussing problems in the forum thread, or filing issues via VirtueTrac, however I’ve been receiving reports that people (including myself) cannot access Trac. Apparently it’s just a DNS issue (we switched servers about a month ago), but it’s taking a long time to right itself.

Thanks for your patience this year - I’m hoping this new build will become the basis for a stable release before christmas!

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What Leopard’s Spaces means for VirtueDesktops future

Tony Arnold — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 06:27:07 +0000

Hey 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

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VirtueDesktops site changes

Tony Arnold — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:36:46 +0000

Hey guys, quick update so nobody freaks out when they’re greeted with WordPress on loading this site rather than the old drupal install. I’ve begun moving the site across to WordPress, as I feel it’s a much simpler system to manage than Drupal (personal opinion only, I’m not going to back that up). So far, so good - there are a couple of kinks to work out, but once that’s done I should have to spend a lot less time managing the new site (which means more releases). And about the broken links — yes, I know — I’ll fix them when it’s not 1 am.

The other (unfortunate) thing that has been happening is that the VirtueTrac install has been defaced a number of times by what appear to be spambots. From here on out, you’ll need to log-in using the username/password ‘virtue/virtue‘ before filing your tickets or making comments - please remember to change the username virtue to your e-mail address before submitting the ticket.

Anyhow, once I’ve sorted out the website theme, and done a little house cleaning, I’ll be headlong back into code updates - I’ve almost finished re-writing the background image setting to be a little more intuitive (and less broken!), as well as removing the need to be a member of the procmod group on intel machines (w00t! thanks to Cédric Luthi for the code that makes this possible).

Oh, and I’m off to WWDC this year, so if you’re going - drop me a line.

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VirtueDesktops working with Parallels again

Tony Arnold — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 02:41:00 +0000

First up, I’d like to thank Parallels (and the mysterious originator of the VirtueDesktop/Parallels demo video on YouTube) for bringing so much attention to VirtueDesktops! I am a heavy user of their Parallels Desktop for Mac at work, and didn’t even think to use VirtueDesktops in that manner.

But back to the issue at hand - in Parallels Desktop Release Candidate (RC) 1, Parallels made some changes to how full-screen focus was handled such that whenever you tried to use VirtueDesktops to switch away from your full-screen Parallels Desktop session, Parallels Desktop would drop out of full-screen mode, back into windowed mode. Well kudos to Parallels for reacting quickly to user feedback, because they’ve fixed it in RC2 and higher. To ensure that your Parallels Desktop sessions remain full-screen when switching using VirtueDesktops, simply open Parallels Desktops’ preferences, navigate to ‘User Interface’, select ‘Advanced…’ and make sure that ‘Exit full screen on focus lost’ is not checked.

As an aside, I’m also calling out anyone to find another news item or blog posting with more valid uses of the word ‘Desktop’ in it. Tony out

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