?virtue

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Has any one tried virtue and do you like it any problems with it.. I have a 20" iMac I read one thread that said it only work with a macbook is this correct
 
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You mean VirtueDesktops?

If so, yes. I like it quite a bit.
 
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yes VirtueDescktop is what I meant I should have been more precise. Thanks for your input
 
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Alright then. Yes, VirtueDesktops has been very good, if occasionally (and I do mean occasionally) buggy. About once every three months its crashed on me, but firing it back up it gets all my windows back on my desktops.

Coming from the Linux/UNIX/CDE/Motif world, it functions slightly different from that of the Gnome pager or CDE 'dock' bar, but essentially I have four very serviceable desktops which I've divided into "Email & Chat" (top left), "Web Stuff" (lower left), "Music Editing" (lower right), and "Image Editing/VM" (top right.) I have the top left corner of any given screen set to be a 'hot corner' to bring up the pager, but usually switch desktops with the Ctrl-Shift arrow key combo. I utilize the 'cube effect' which impresses observers muchly. Desktop switching is quick and smooth on my Macbook, and when using an external screen that is capable when spanned, the cube effect works great on both screens. Very spectacular. I do have an external screen that I use every now and then that is apparently not capable of displaying the effect but all that means is that it switches without it on the external, while using it on the LCD. Not a big deal.

For the most part it has been quite useful, and I can't really imagine using my Mac without it. I do need to be careful about certain apps throwing up notification boxes that require acknowledgement when I'm in a different desktop from the one in which the app sending it resides. Sometimes I have to go on a bit of a hunt for the box to click OK or whatever, but Exposé pretty much lets me find it alright. For some apps it seems to handle that sort of thing fine. For example iChat resides in the "Email and Chat" desktop, but if someone sends an IM and it pops up a bubble in the current (different) desktop I'm working in, when I click the window it'll rotate to the desktop iChat lives in, and displays the message in that desktop for me to click Accept and continue chatting where I'm "supposed" to be chatting. It does have a slightly annoying tendency to auto-switch me to an adjacent desktop when I quit an app that is in the current desktop, but a quick keystroke and I'm right back to where I want to be (if that's what I want to do, which is usually the case; hence the annoyance.)

As I've said, it can be just a little buggy, mostly in setting up the desktops the way I want with the Preferences options, but once that was done it's pretty stable. It enhances greatly my workflow (or more accurately, "playflow") and if you were to observe me working with my Mac you'd see plenty of quick desktop switches all over the place as I go between each screen and its app(s). I like to have lots of screen real-estate, and it essentially quadruples the size of my screen. I think you can have more or less, but I find that four is quite sufficient. It is very good with switching to the appropriate desktop if I click a running app's icon in the dock. Occasionally an app will somehow get grabbed into a desktop I don't wish it to reside, but to put it back, you simply hide the app, switch to the desktop in which you wish it to live, and unhide it.

My brother-in-law whom I got to switch a few months ago also uses it, and was impressed by both the effects and the impressive ability to organize apps into discrete desktops. Combined with Exposé it's pretty powerful if you are of the mind to keep track of what is where. My wife, for example kind of isn't and thus she doesn't use it even though I showed her the concept.

I'm looking forward to Spaces on Leopard, but in the meantime or if Leopard didn't feature Spaces and broke Virtue I'd be happy to stick with Tiger and VirtueDesktops.
 

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