Thursday, September 25, 2008

Spaces, expose and custom mouse buttons - sweet

Until now 10.5 hasn't really done anything for me. Yeah, I can now share the shared folder, and that's good -- but, on the other hand, Leopard remote desktop is a toy.

Spaces, though, they're nicer than I thought. For example:
macosxhints.com - 10.5: Drag and drop between Spaces

... If you have two applications in two separate spaces (e.g iPhoto and Keynote), and you would like to drag an item from the first application to drop in the second application, here are two easy ways to do just that.

First, you can drag the item (file, photo, etc..), press F8 and then select the other space, then drop the item into the other application. Or you can drag the file, press Command-Tab, and then drop the dragged icon on the other application. You will then be switched automatically to the other space to drop your stuff, just like in Tiger.
But it gets better. My Microsoft Mouse has four buttons and a clickable scroll wheel. I mapped button 3 Expose - desktop, button 4 to Spaces, and the wheel to Expose - all windows. (To do this I set button 4 to "Mac OS controlled", then in Spaces Preferences set button 4 to show Spaces).

Now, if I'm working on something, I can click button 4, then I can drag windows between spaces (nice). I can also use the expose buttons within any spaces window I click on.

I have 4 spaces now and will probably scale up. You can assign an app to a space, and I might do that for the Finder, but in general I prefer to organize by task. That's why I'm de-emphasizing tabbed browser use -- I prefer to use windows and Spaces to organize my work.

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