I’ve been tinkering with OS X 10.5 Leopard, and played with its virtual desktop feature, Spaces – but just tinkering. And I’ve only just realized what it is I’m waiting for before I really commit to it:
I’m waiting for Merlin Mann to tell me how to use it.
That’s how you know when you’ve arrived as a productivity guru: people aren’t productive until you tell them to be.
(Anyway, now that I’ve realized what I’m waiting for, I’ve embarrassed myself into taking on some more serious experimentation.)
It surprises me that it’s taken 20ish years for virtual desktops to come to the Mac considering how Mac users tend to have more windows open than Windows types. I would think that for a lot of people, Exposé was a good enough solution to window clutter that they won’t bother with virtual desktops.
On my Linux box (where I’m currently using an Exposé knockoff AND virtual desktops), I tend to use a desktop for each task I’m working on, using “Scale” (the Exposé clone) to switch windows on a given viewport; I could show all windows on all viewports with that feature, but when you’ve 30-odd windows open, that approach is almost as bad as fishing through a bunch of “identical” thingies minimised in the OS X Dock.