Virtue virtual desktop manager for Tiger

Back under Panther, we mac users had two very good options for virtual desktops on our small screens: Desktop Manager — the grand-daddy of all mac desktop switchers, and Virtue Desktops — a flashy, feature-packed fork of Desktop Manager. Personally, I didn’t get much of a chance to play with Virtue due to my involvement in the testing of Tiger, but people constantly touted it’s features and told me I should try it – that’s a little hard when the application didn’t even start under Tiger.

Well, now it does. I’m happy with the featureset that Desktop Manager provides, and I like it’s simplicity, but there a couple of things I have found in Virtue that I think (when they work) could be very, very useful. I could wait for Rich to update Desktop Manager, but he appears to have disappeared into a complex maze of study, linux and the so-called “real world™”. So I decided to do it myself.

Straight up, you cannot go to Thomas Staller (Virtue’s original author), nor Rich Wareham, the author of Desktop Manager — this mess is my own, and I’m quite sure neither of those chaps wants to know about problems you’re having with my bastardised version of their code. Second: it runs. That’s pretty much all I’ll guarantee — all of Virtue 0.5r2’s features are there, and some of them work just as they did before, but others are horridly broken (the desktop label option for example). Third: I’m not making any guarantees that this is something I intend to update often or at all — I started this because another software author egged me on (you know who you are, Mr. Jitkoff), and because I wanted to get back into programming for the mac.

Requirements

Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”
A want to make your screen get all flippy (check out the “Flip Desktop” transition — that’s new for Tiger)
Quartz Extreme? (not sure on that — could someone let me know?)

Again, if you have trouble — you’re contacting me with those troubles – now download away: ~Virtue 0.5r3 (~ 1.2 Mb)~ — I’ve removed this download.

Update: The VirtueDesktops project has moved to new hosting at cocoaforge, which is graciously provided by imajes. You can download the latest version of VirtueDesktops there.

∞
Posted: October 23, 2005 at 20:30
Tagged: Cocoa, Programming

Comments

Early days yet — I've only just started to acquaint myself with Thomas' code, so it could be a while before _anything_gets fixed properly. I believe I'll probably fork Virtue too, and rename it given that Thomas holds the copyright on a lot of the code and the Virtue name — I'm not sure what my vision is for this yet, but I like simplicity, so it'll probably be cut right back for the first “proper” release. Anyway, enjoy :)

Posted by Tony on October 25, 2005 at 03:47

Good work!
It looks it work with Tiger, great!

Posted by jurriaan on October 30, 2005 at 19:38

I just wanted to leave words of thanks and encouragement and to put a second vote in for fixing the hotkey combos which take you directly to a specific desktop. Thanks for stepping up and filling a large gap in Tiger.

Posted by Nick on November 1, 2005 at 03:00

perhaps a donate button if it'll help. I'd love to have the south desktop accessible from any east west desktop. then i could pop in and out of my chat etc. i guess ideally there'd be a layout editor, but it might be overkill.

Posted by 1012 on November 2, 2005 at 00:15

I always loved Virtue on Panther, but after switching to Tiger I had to use the (very, very stable) Desktop Manager instead, leaving me with a need for some of the features Virtue offered. Thank you for going all this way to put new life into this project!

Posted by knut on November 2, 2005 at 15:53

Yes! Thankyou for doing this Tony.
When I switched to Tiger I tried to live with Expose alone, but ended up going to Desktop Manager. But even that has problems, crashing the dock on the first desktop switch for example.
I was going to give up on virtual desktops today — but thought I'd check if Virtue or DM had been updated.
And then I find this!
Thanks again.

Posted by adrinux on November 10, 2005 at 16:02

Good work and go ahead. I ask me btw what happens with Thomas. My last email contact with him was one years ago was full with ideas…hm. I hope he is ok.
0.511 runs very stable under 10.4.3
Greetings

Posted by macman on November 14, 2005 at 19:30

He guys you are great man.…
Virtue is the best software I have ever seen…
I almost cried because it wasnt developed further for Tiger… But now seeing this…
You guys, thank you so very much…
Keep developing…
More transitions are welcome…
:)

Posted by Cuneyt on November 26, 2005 at 02:02

Rock! I'm glad someone has picked up the torch again, as neither of the parent projects seems to have been touched for a year or more. I can't beleive the commercial options haven't looked at the features available here and tried to emulate them — none of the commercial demos that I've tried seem to offer nearly the level of performance or customizability.

Posted by Chad on December 14, 2005 at 20:16

Excellent! Thanks a lot! Works like a charm!
Anyway, I wonder where these guys are. I had some chat sessions with Thomas back in 2004, but somehow he vanished without leaving a trace …
Cheers
A.

Posted by André Bonhôte on December 28, 2005 at 20:52

Hi to everybody. I'm one of the Virtue developer (localizator) and I have write access to virtue CVS. If people who has made changes are interested in commiting changes to the original CVS, please let me know.

Posted by Narvill on January 8, 2006 at 05:43

I have to say it runs wicked fast on intel even through rosetta! can't wait for the UB! :)

Posted by Derick on March 23, 2006 at 14:02

Derick: <http://virtuedesktops.info/>
it's a Universal Binary now :)

Posted by Tony Arnold on March 23, 2006 at 17:14

hey the virtuedesktops.info site seems totally broken. how can we download Virtue?

Posted by steev on December 10, 2007 at 06:17

Sorry, this conversation has finished.

This post is a bit old now, so I've closed the conversation. If you're keen to keep talking about it, please email me directly.