Download Virtual Desktops for OS X

whitesaint

whitesaint

cocoa love
Hi all, this is a final beta build of my application, Virtual Desktops for Mac OS X. I'm quite aware that there are quite a few bugs in it. It is an installer.

Here is what is new:

- No more Dock Icon
- Preferences in System Preference (animate check box doesn't work yet)
- Launches automatically at start up for different users
- Support for 1-4 different virtual desktops.

Here are some of the bugs:

- The first Image to show up in the windows is not the right desktop, switch the desktops and everything will work fine.
- The "Animate Switching Desktops" in the System Preferences doesn't work.
- Speed increases dramitically on lower resolutions or thousands of colors.


Well enough talk, download here:

http://homepage.mac.com/whitesaint/Desktop Manager.dmg


If you want to un-Install Virtual Desktops:

( "~" is your home directory)

Remove the files from:

/Application/Desktop Manager
~/Library/PreferencePanes/Desktop Manager.pane
~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist
 
I love it man! Now I can use 1 desktop for Home, 1 desktop for business work, 1 desktop for hacking stuff, and 1 desktop for whatever the heck I feel like using it for! :D

It's really sweet, ever thought of making it a pay-source project?
 
Hey Trip. Thanks for trying it out. How is your experience with it going? What do you mean by a "pay-source" project?
 
Pay-source is where you sell the actual application program for a little money (very little!) but then also sell the source code for a little bit more money, it's worked for me on the Features Guide! :)
 
uhm,
i like the idea, but...

on my lombard, the 4 desktop windows show up, the menu-extra shows up, and i can click on one of the four desktop resemblances in the menu to show/hide the windows.
i can also doubleclick on the current desktop's window to update it, but whenever i doubleclick on one of the other desktops, i'm stuck with the current view and can't do anything else. the screen's just frozen (or so it seems).

i can quit the desktop manager, though, and everything is back top normal, but it requires me to switch to the app (which i can by using launchbar).

am i missing something? :)

keep up the work, since it looks promising...
 
Okay here ya guys go, download an update to the application (just the application!) here. Note that this version there is a dock icon.

What's new in this update:

- You can have multiple files on different desktops.

Is this better than the last version? Any ideas/requests for the program?
 
Your program shows great promise, but coming from an X-windows world, its pretty slow when changing from one desktop to another.

Another minor grip I have is that the boxes that you draw in the title bar only toggles whether or not you see the pager boxes. I would prefer that you made an option where if I click a box in the title bar, it would go to that desktop versus the toggling effect. While seeing a smaller version of whats on each destop is nice eye candy, its really not all that useful for me. I would rather you lost the pager windows altogether and use that toggling box to actually be the desktop switching interface. It would probably make your app way faster since it won't be constantly updating the view in each desktop. If that's not an option, make it so that you can close the paging windows altogether and use the four boxes at the top to switch desktops... also, number the boxes so users can keep track of which desktop is which.

Anyway, nice work so far... I just feel the interface is a bit clunky. Perhaps you can setup a control panel like thing where the configuration backgrounds can be setup or changed in the system preferences, sort of maxmenues does.
 
Originally posted by BSDimwit
Your program shows great promise, but coming from an X-windows world, its pretty slow when changing from one desktop to another.

Another minor grip I have is that the boxes that you draw in the title bar only toggles whether or not you see the pager boxes. I would prefer that you made an option where if I click a box in the title bar, it would go to that desktop versus the toggling effect. While seeing a smaller version of whats on each destop is nice eye candy, its really not all that useful for me. I would rather you lost the pager windows altogether and use that toggling box to actually be the desktop switching interface. It would probably make your app way faster since it won't be constantly updating the view in each desktop. If that's not an option, make it so that you can close the paging windows altogether and use the four boxes at the top to switch desktops... also, number the boxes so users can keep track of which desktop is which.

Anyway, nice work so far... I just feel the interface is a bit clunky. Perhaps you can setup a control panel like thing where the configuration backgrounds can be setup or changed in the system preferences, sort of maxmenues does.
Click to expand...

Hey thanks for the feedback. *sigh* yes it is very slow when switching desktops. You will probably find a huge increase in speed when using smaller resolutions and/or thousands of colors. I should have worked a lil bit more for this beta for the "animate switching desktops" checkbox to work.

Okay, your idea for switching desktops in the menu bar is good and all, except there is one little problem. How do you know which desktop you are switching to? Those little boxes aren't big enough to draw a preview in...

Anyways, thanks for trying my app :D.
 
If you were to put numbers in each box to show which desktop was being represented, the user would remember where he was using mozilla and where he had photoshop open. If you look at KDE or Windowmaker, they don't show you previews and the switching flies. One caviat to this though, you would need to highlight which desktop the user was currently on by a change of color or a blinking number is the box or some other mechanism. Now I know very little about programming all in all, well I know perl but that doesn't count for this application, but it seems to me that the cycles spent by generating previews could be spent on speeding up the desktop switch. Mostly I guess I just want a mechanism to switch desktops without having to have the preview windows cluttering up my usable desk space, hence my suggestion to convert the menu bar boxes to the switching interface instead of double clicking the preview boxes.

Like I said, the preview feature is great eye candy and all but I don't need it. All I need is to be able to switch from one desktop to another quickly. Being able to see a preview is nice if you need to be reminded whats on each desktop, but I think most power users(the ones that will want virtual desktops in the first place) can remember where they had their stuff open, but even if they didn't remember, if the switching were faster, they could just flip thru them to find what they need.

Anywho, I don't want you think I don't appreciate the work you have done so far, its very good. I guess I am just used to the way xwindow managers I use tend to work. Maybe both functionalities can be incorporated... if you had a control panel in system preferences, you could set it up so that the default switching mechanism is the way you currently do it, and an alternative is to lose the preview pagers, and convert the box on the menu bar to the switcher instead. Not to metion the control panel would provide a means to switch the desktop wallpaper around instead of relying on its initial run to set that up.

Anyway, thanks for listening.
 
On installing, the Desktop Manager setup application seemed to run fine, but then nothing happened. I checked out the Login Items .plist and I noticed that it referenced another "Desktop Manager.app" in the "/Applications" folder. I assume that it tried to install the application from "Contents/Application Folder" (inside the setup application) there, but I have that folder locked down with admin permissions and I don't run as a privileged user when I can help it. I'm probably an edge case in this respect, but it should at least issue a warning when the attempt to install fails.

I think the Installer may have removed items that were previously in my Login Items, but I'm not certain about that.

What are your plans for the source?
 
I may be the only one who experienced this, but when I installed the app, it deleted all of my login items :(. This was especially annoying as there were several items in there that were put there by other installers, and I don't know where they are on the hard drive to put them back. Good app otherwise though, although I don't think it is for me :).
 
I may be the only one who experienced this, but when I installed the app, it deleted all of my login items . This was especially annoying as there were several items in there that were put there by other installers, and I don't know where they are on the hard drive to put them back. Good app otherwise though, although I don't think it is for me .
Click to expand...

same thing happened to me, i found it troublesome
 
Sorry about the deleted Login items guys. I can't figure a way around it... I will in the future though. I'm going to start a new thread of a brand new beta, huge amount of bug fixes, check it out in this forum.
 
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