VirtueDesktops and Apple Spaces / Posts / tonyarnold.com

OK, I guess I should blog about this, because I’ve got people hammering me about Apple’s Spaces from all sides (I love the attention — keep it coming!).

I think it’s a great thing. VirtueDesktops, and all of the other virtual desktop/screen managers on the Mac have been little more than complicated hacks, forcing your machine to emulate what most UNIX machines do out of the box — which isn’t a bad thing per se, but I have yet to see an implementation that felt integrated.

“What about the future of VirtueDesktops?”, you ask? Well… I don’t know yet. I imagine that I could add features to Apple’s implementation, hanging off whatever they are doing, but to be honest it seems like a brilliant implementation to me. And I guess there’s 10.4 support for another year or so, but to be honest, the stuff they showed us about Xcode 3 today blew me away. No-one in their right mind will keep developing in Xcode 2 once version 3 is out (yes, it is that good!).

Oh, I also went along to the SciFiHiFi Weblogger’s party for a couple of hours tonight (I imagine it’s still kicking, because Lord Will of the Shipley had just grooved through the door 5 minutes before I chose to leave). My impressions — the Tamale Lady rocks, and Jason Harris has to be the smiliest dude this side of Ronald MacDonald himself. Here’s hoping I am a little less soft for the next party (I think there’s a WebKit party on tomorrow night). WWDC rocks hard guys – if you can afford it and are interested in development, definitely come along next year — this looks like it’s shaping up to be plenty of fun, and we haven’t even got to the technical sessions yet! If you’re a student studying at an Australian university, find out if your uni is part of the Apple University Consortium — they’ve sponsored my trip this year and I am absolutely grateful!

Comments

Is XCode 3 still covered by NDA? I can't see anything about it on the ADC site.

Posted by Anonymous Coward on August 8, 2006 at 15:22

I think congratulations are in order. I think there is a certain amount of honor in knowing you app was good enough for Apple to copy. This feature was long rumored and it was only inevitable considering Apple was running out of wow factors to include with every itteration of thier OS. It seams to me that Apple looks as if they are running out of good ideas and instead adding bits of eye candy to suck in new customers. I would much rather see Apple optimise the hell out of OS X then deliver more features that normal people (“non technical”) wont use.
But anyway I am getting of track. Congrats to you Tony. It looks like you will have to lend your mind to some new app because Virtue-Desktops days are numbered.

Posted by Alex on August 12, 2006 at 15:51

Xcode 3 preview information is up on the preview site at <http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html>. it's not a public release, and was seeded to developers at WWDC. And yes, it is hot. Very, very hot. I can say no more :)

Posted by Tony Arnold on August 13, 2006 at 02:02

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.