I think Spaces is dead. I doesn’t really fit anywhere in the vision of the desktop Apple showed off in the Lion sneak peak, Apple might have decided to quietly drop it. The new fullscreen mode might take its place.
Spaces wasn’t mentioned in the demo at all and it would be very inelegant to just tack it on top of the concept Apple has for the desktop. I will be surprised if it is still there when Lion arrives.
Multitouch gestures to switch between spaces (instead of fullscreen apps as was demoed in the sneak peak) would be pretty cool but I’m not holding my breath.
Apple does like to drop nerdy features few people use from time to time. The only thing that gives me pause is that they also seem quite happy to keep at least some of them around. The screen corners would be one example. (Then again, screen corners don’t change the whole desktop around.)
As a long time desktop *nix user, I have no idea how any one works without multiple workspaces. For me it's second nature to me to switch to another workspace to start a new kind of task.
Multiple workspaces is such a brilliantly simple concept I am surprised it took so long for it to be adopted into OS X. Sadly (for OS X users) Spaces is pretty poorly done compared to how multiple workspaces generally work in Gnome or KDE.
Really? In Spaces, I can grab a window with my trackpad and then hit my hotkey to go to the next space. In Gnome on Ubuntu, I have to right-click and hit "move to workspace", and in apps with nonstandard widgets (read: Chrome), even that doesn't work and I have to go down to the taskbar to do that.
You can do this in most desktop managers for Linux as well, where Spaces fails is how each workspace in managed. In Gnome each workspace acts almost like a new lite session, for example only the applications in the current workspace show up in my task bar (this is optional by the way) and when I alt+tab then only the applications on the current workspace are tabbed through. This works very well because when I switch between different task (say photo editing and programming) I don't want to generally think about what other non-related task/applications are running on my system. In Spaces every workspace is part of a kind of global workspace and there is no hiding of task environments.
The different environments all have their own shortcuts, but you can definitely customize things. Might I suggest awesomewm? It takes about two days of reference back to the man page (keep it up in its own tag ;) ) but after that you generally have the hang of it, and it has far more advanced features for workspaces/tags than the other players, at least the floating WMs.
I've never really liked Gnome much, you might want to try some of the other DEs out there, especially since Gnome is pushing a whole new interface in a few months so you'll have to learn new stuff anyway.
I think it took so long to be implemented in OS X because it's actually not a big benefit when you have a nice windowing system with drag and drop that works everywhere (in fact the benefits of drag and drop are significantly reduced by using virtual screens and the benefit is -- for most users -- outweighed by the cost).
You're the first person I've heard describe OS X as having a "nice windowing system". OS X has many good traits, but I've always thought of the WM as being rather poorly done. As far as I can tell it lacks proper maximization, horizontal/vertical maximization, snapping, mousefocus, intelligent raise behavior, tiling, tabbing, omnipresence, pin-to-top, pin-to-background, keyboard move-resize, and meta-key drag+resize. Not to mention configurable bindings for any of these.
Now there's single-app mode, which I take as a tacit acknowledgement that real maximization instead of "zoom" was a good idea after all. How long did that take, again?
I reallyreally want to like OS X. It does so many things right (focus-stealing, DnD, and copy-paste among them!) It's just so painful to use after having a real WM.
[edit] For reference, I use Openbox; the listed features (except for tiling/tabbing) are what I use everyday. I expect the awesome/ratpoison crowd has slightly different but no less valid criticisms.
Expose is really really good. The biggest problem with Spaces is that it doesn't 'play nice' with Expose.
The maximising the Window thing is a tacit acknowledgement that you're not actually using the full potential of your desktop as a multi-application environment. :-P
If you want to bash a Windowing system that truly deserves it, bash the one from Windows! OS X isn't perfect, but Windows is really really bad. Except for Windows 7, which made big improvements (aka copying OS X) and is now merely really bad.
Are you confusing Windowing System with Window Manager?
I'll give you that Linux has a few better WMs than OS X. (I'm particularly fond of Openbox myself, and was always excited about the elusive 'Enlightenment e17'.)
However, I cannot accept any claim that X is better than Quartz.
> Are you confusing Windowing System with Window Manager?
His comment is fair considering the parent comment was confusing about why it took so long to get spaces (an aspect of window management) because of elements of the windowing system.
YMMV. There are two features that I'm missing from the *nix implementations i've seen, which work great in Spaces. One is the ability to find a window across multiple desktops (spaces+exposé ) and the other is the ability to assign a default space for different applications
Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that
provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running
on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything
— including Exposé, >>> Spaces <<<, Dashboard, and full-screen apps.
There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails
of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and >>> even other Spaces <<<,
arranged in a unified view.
I'll be SO FUCKING PISSED if Apple goes and drops Spaces now. It's a piece of crap software that is far inferior to what came before, but since it came standard it drove the other multi-desktop extensions out of business. (I was particularly fond of VirtualDesktop.) Now Apple is the only game in town for multiple virtual desktops, and they might take it away?
You know when Microsoft did this sort of thing in the browser wars, a lot of people got up in arms about it.
I'm kind of hoping the Lion demo turns out to be a complete dead end. Most of the stuff in the demo seemed quite badly thought out.
http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 (careful watching of the demo revealed that pretty much nothing showed worked terribly well)
I think it might be interesting to integrate ideas in spaces, expose, etc. by dynamically rescaling the UI when the user does stuff like resize or move a window. (After all, when you're messing with a window's dimensions you're generally not too concerned with every pixel in a given window.)
In other words -- why does Expose need to be an explicit mode? When I resize or drag and drop -- rescale the UI dynamically to deal with the relationships between windows and apps. And this becomes even easier if some or most windows are full screen by default.
The guy who did the demo was visibly shaking, I think the errors he made were more owed to his own nervousness than flaws with the software. We will see, this is really you would have to use to see whether it works.
I use BetterTouchTools http://www.boastr.de/ which is free and I just setup three finger swipe to change spaces in that direction and three finger tap to see all spaces. I love it and hate using another computer without it now.
Not for the vast majority of OS X users. Sure, many of the tech-savvy Mac users I know use it, but none of the laymen do. And it's the laymen that Apple's primarily targeting, because they're a much bigger market and much easier to satisfy.
Not necessarily true or they would have stopped shipping things like the terminal.app a long time ago (or including python, ruby, etc.). Even apps like Automator are probably out of the scope of 'laymen'.
I only use it as a cheap way to mentally background apps that won't be looked at as often (e.g. iTunes, running a server in Terminal).
I find that the focus model tends to break down in Spaces for any multi-window application like Finder, Chrome, Emacs and Terminal. If every window of an application is going to jump to the top then that just adds extra work to switching desktops.
That being said, I do like the Application->Window switching model on it's own and wouldn't trade this for Virtual Desktops.
Spaces is, first and foremost, off by default meaning that it’s pretty likely that most people don’t know about it and have never used it. If Apple would consider it essential, it would be on by default.
Some people might think that Spaces is essential but Apple seems to disagree with them. (I’m not saying that Apple is right.)
I'm not sure where I stand on this, however, I'd like to provide one data point, one that I expect many HNers share. I'm primarily a web developer, though I do frequently work on Android projects or random hacking on some python projects ( sage anyone? ). For web development, I find spaces essential. I have several api docs open at any given time, eclipse for android stuff, Aquamacs ( emacs in cocoa ), potentially an Android emulator, a preview image from our designer, several browser tabs for email, roadmap, and backlog tasks and a team chat window.
I, too, thought that most people wouldn't really care much for spaces, however I have noticed several of my non-technical friends using and began wondering. The conclusion that I came to is that, if you replace my IDE with something like MS Word and my text editor with something else, perhaps Photoshop or Illustrator, you'd get roughly the same workflow that I have, just without the code.
Now, I'm not saying that Spaces is essential, but I this is one case where something we think is nerdy, is actually pretty main stream.
Since were on the topic of application visibility and switching. I'm wondering if there is a better way than spaces. It's obvious that full-screen mode with easy switching isn't it. I find that context switch to complicated though I'm not quite sure why - way back when I was on windows, that was the way I did things. Perhaps expose is underused?
There was a good discussion in the Hypercritical podcast by John Siracusa and Dan Benajamin about Spaces possibly being dead in 10.7. It was in episode 3: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/3
One note, you can use Better Touch Tool to invoke Spaces (and Expose) with gestures. I have 4-fingers-right for Spaces and 4-fingers down for Expose, is quite nice.
I would be most unhappy if Spaces went away, but I wouldn't be too surprised either.
Spaces wasn’t mentioned in the demo at all and it would be very inelegant to just tack it on top of the concept Apple has for the desktop. I will be surprised if it is still there when Lion arrives.
Multitouch gestures to switch between spaces (instead of fullscreen apps as was demoed in the sneak peak) would be pretty cool but I’m not holding my breath.
Apple does like to drop nerdy features few people use from time to time. The only thing that gives me pause is that they also seem quite happy to keep at least some of them around. The screen corners would be one example. (Then again, screen corners don’t change the whole desktop around.)