Hyperspaces 1.0 Public Preview

About 12 months ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine that convinced me it was time to try my hand at writing a commercial software product. At the time, I had only very recently dropped development of VirtueDesktops and was seriously considering just taking a break from Mac development for a while — thankfully I didn’t, and today I’m releasing the fruits of 12 months of learning and hard work: Hyperspaces 1.0 Public Preview.

So what’s this all about, you ask? Put simply, Hyperspaces works hand-​in-​hand with Apple’s Spaces to add back a few key features that traditional virtual desktop applications provide, such as:

• Different desktop backgrounds per-​space;
• Coloured tinting of desktop backgrounds per-​space;
• Naming of each space;
• Desktop labels that show each space’s name;
• Customisable hotkeys to switch directly to each space;
• and more!

I’ve got quite a few features on the drawing board including a much more customisable switcher and more customisation options for each space.

I also need to thank quite a few people who’ve been a huge support and invaluable resources:

• My girl Leah — you can have your boy back for a bit now sweetheart :)
• Jan Van Boghout for all of the code and advice at every stage of development;
• Sean O’Brien for the kickass space selector view in the preferences (and quite a few other groovy graphical doodads!);
• Steve Voida who helped reverse engineer quite a number of new private CGS calls (thanks Steve!);
• Nik Youdale and Zac Cohan from Aqualia for advice and crazy code that I barely understand;
• Chris Forsythe for the kick in the pants to do this in the first place;
• Sebastiaan De With for the incredible application icon;
• Neil Ang, James Pamplin and Dean Robinson — for constantly, consistently pestering me to finish this app — you guys are awesome to work with — roll out, CocoaBots!

It’s been a long and rewarding road over the last year, and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it but here’s a couple of things I’ll know not to do next time:

1. Working full-​time while trying to get your first product off the ground is really hard — I found taking a break once every few weekends really made a difference;
2. Don’t buy a house in the middle of writing your first application (on top of working full time);
3. Don’t start renovating a house in the middle of writing your first application (on top of … you get the picture);
4. Be ready to drop features for 1.0. The Hyperspaces alphas had some great features that will probably come back in a future release, but they weren’t critical to what I am trying to achieve with Hyperspaces;

I’ll post a post-​mortem that goes into some detail about the programming challenges I faced in a few days. OK, enough rambling from me — go download the preview and let me know what you think!