David Pogue at Macworld 2008: Using Leopard's Spaces

By David Pogue

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TRANSCRIPT

So another hot new feature is called Spaces. Spaces is virtual screens that lets you set up up to 16 virtual monitors like stacks in a grid. You do it in system preferences. You have to turn it on explicitly like this. Here’s how you set how many rows and columns of virtual monitors you want. This could get really confusing. Where’s my e-mail? So let’s set up four. You can set up a little menu up here that will let you easily switch from one to the other or you can use your keystrokes. It defaults to control up, down, left, right arrows so you can shift from the keyboard, or control 1, 2, 3, 4 as well.

This is kind of interesting. Here you can set up which of those virtual monitors you want which of your programs to open into automatically, so that way over time you get used to your e-mail being in the upper right and your web browser in the lower left and Microsoft Office in the lower right and so on. Then once you’re there this gets a little crazy but let’s open up a Word .doc file. So now when I hit F8 I see all four of my screens at once as a map, and this is one way you can either jump to a different screen, let’s open up my calendar on this screen, or drag something from one screen to another. So if I wanted both of these windows on the same screen I could do that and now indeed these are on the same page as it were.

So there are some other ways to move from one screen to another. This is the one that’s documented. By the way, I can use my command keys too. Here’s a weird little quirk I bet nobody knows. See this little map that pops up that shows which way I’m going? If I want to go from number 1 to number 3 most people think that they have to go right and down or sometimes you have to think of going – like you want to go from upper left to lower right, most people think it takes two keystrokes to get there. It doesn’t. You can hit two arrow keys at the same time. I’m at number one. I can press down and to the right at the same time and I’ll go directly there.

So anyway, what I was gonna say was many, many undocumented features here. One of them is that you don’t need to go into that little map view to move windows around. You can just grab a window and start dragging against the edge and it will pop up on to the next screen for you. You see what I’m saying? So I just went up on to this screen without having to enter the F8 view. There are some other cool features too. What if you want to drag an iPhoto picture into an outgoing e-mail and they’re on separate spaces? You know how you can drag an object into an e-mail to attach it? So what are you supposed to do about that?

Well what you do is you start the drag with your mouse still down. You hit the keystroke to switch spaces and then release the mouse.