Alexander Klimetschek's Blog On Software Design and Development

Leopard Spaces vs. two-monitor setup

I am a great fan of Spaces, the new virtual desktop system in Mac OS X, introduced with Leopard. It allows me to have more screen real estate on my MacBook Pro when I don't have the possibility to connect to a second monitor.

Now in my office or at home I do have a second monitor and Spaces works intuitively there as well: each space contains both monitors then, as you can see above in the right part of the image. Having a separate space management for each monitor would be too complicated, so this is just right.

But here is my problem: when I connect or disconnect the second monitor, ie. I am switching between single and multi-monitor setup, I have to reconfigure spaces each time. Because my application placement with a single monitor (eg. one for my Eclipse IDE, one for the browser(s), one for mail/calendering, one for iChat and Skype) is different from two monitors, where I want to take advantage of looking at my IDE and the browser at the same time. With a single monitor I use 6 spaces, whereas with 2 monitors 4 are more than enough. But I hate to reposition my 10+ applications two times a day.

A solution could be the concept of spaces profiles: each monitor setup could have its own profile, ie. the number of spaces columns and rows as well as the application-on-a-certain-space settings. Mac OS X already recognizes the different monitors you connect to it and remembers the exact arrangement. So what about profiles, Apple?

Posted at 12:38AM Jan 17, 2008 by Alexander Klimetschek in Apple  |  Comments[2]