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.
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.