virtuedesktops
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One Shots: A fiery finale
After a long, hard day of fighting crime in Paragon City, many heroes like to head for Pocket D and unwind with a dance, a drink, and perhaps a bit of flirting. With that said, if you're on Virtue, City of Heroes' unofficial role-playing server, you might even run into a party centered on one of the server's more interesting personae, such as this recent event that first-time submitter, Dekar, wandered into and got a screenshot of for us. He writes in to explain: "Tonight I saw an interesting community sight. I logged in to City of Heroes on my main, Torch Light, to work out some aggression on the Freakshow tonight before bed -- and saw this in Pocket D. My server Virtue has its own fan radio station, The Cape, and apparently the local listeners were giving a lighter-held-high finish to the evening's show. Didn't catch the music but it seems DJ Shecky was on fire tonight! (I am so sorry for that joke...)" One Shots is looking for screenshots from all over the multiverse, so this weekend why not grab some images for us? All you have to do to be our bestest friend forevar is to email those MMO screenshots to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing. Yours might even be the next one featured here on Massively! %Gallery-85937%
TUAW Desktop of the Week
This week's TUAW Desktop hails from Flickr user form953, who has managed to turn both Dashboard and the Dock more or less Inside Out. The iStat pro widget is running in Development Mode, which is what allows it to live on the Desktop, separate from the Dashboard. I'm not entirely sure how form953 managed to pin the Dock underneath the menubar, however; I've seen that option in one utility or another, but have never used it so I'm blanking on which apps allow for this. Here's a list of what else form953 has going on here, thankfully provided along with this shot at Flickr: wallpaper and Disctop from mekentosj.com iStat pro widget running in developer mode Bytecontroller SMARTReporter Spirited Away VirtueDesktops (which, sadly, is no longer being developed due to Leopard's upcoming Spaces feature) Google Desktop for Mac Chip Set icons If you'd like to see your unique, functional or otherwise interesting desktop featured in our TUAW Desktops of the Week series, check out past featured desktops as well as the original post for the rules and to get an idea of what we're looking for. Then, upload your desktop screenshot to our TUAW Desktops Flickr group. We'll feature one or more desktops each weekend, giving credit to the desktop owner, wallpaper creator and any apps featured in the screenshot (if available). Keep those desktops rolling in!
VirtueDesktops Developer Calls It Quits
Tony Arnold, the developer of the free virtual desktop program VirtueDesktops, on Saturday announced that he is no longer going to develop the software. Citing Leopard's forthcoming Spaces and the time necessary to work on the project as reasons, he has decided to stop development at this time. He says he doesn't want to kill the project and so invites other developers to take it up. It's sad to see development end on a nice piece of software (though, personally I thought the commercial You Control: Desktops was considerably more stable), but as Tony says, the writing was on the wall pretty much as soon as Spaces was announced at WWDC last year.[Via Digg]
VirtueDesktops update brings lots of changes, bug fixes
VirtueDesktops, the virtual desktop manager of choice, recently updated to version 0.54 beta 2 with a major set of changes and bug fixes. This forum post at cocoaforge rounds up all the changes of a few recent builds, including this latest beta. To summarize: the main gist is a lot of focus on UI tweaks and improvements. Rearranging desktops, desktop inspector improvements, crash fixes and plugs for memory leaks are all on the table. If you want to download the new version and are interested in the details, hit the forum post for everything you need to know. Otherwise the VirtueDesktops downloads page should do you just fine, but don't forget to donate to show your appreciation.
Why wait for Leopard? Get a virtual desktop manager now
Mac publications are all taking a new eye to the apps and features that Leopard is 'killing,' and Dan's post about the 7 apps that Leopard kills inspired me to check out the current market of virtual desktop managers for Mac OS X. Since I'm on a MacBook Pro however, the only one I could really put through the ringer was VirtueDesktops, which is fine since it seems like a feature-packed and very capable virtual desktop manager. Hence, another post in an ongoing theme here at TUAW: Why wait for Leopard?While we didn't get a full shakedown of Spaces at WWDC 2006, VirtueDesktops seems to offer the same functionality, with quite a few tricks up its sleeve. Barb blogged VirtueDesktops in February 2005, but it has certainly come a ways since then. It still offers a basic set of four desktops with the ability to add more, and it's very keyboard shortcut-friendly. Here's a quick rundown of the rest of this highly customizable desktop manger: Eye candy - a wide variety of the standard Aqua transitions are available for switching between desktops. This alone is worth showing off to friends, even if you aren't into the multiple desktop thing AppleScript-able Extensible with plugins Works with Growl to let you know which desktop you've switched to (you can name them for better organization and recognition) Sticky windows and apps - you can bind apps to one desktop or another, or specify them to show on all desktops. This is handy, for example, if Mail.app is 'stuck' to a 'Communication' desktop. Clicking on Mail.app in the dock will automatically switch to the required desktop There's even more to this virtual desktop utility, and since Leopard is taking a while to cook, why not check it out? VirtueDesktops is donationware and a Universal Binary.
7 apps that Leopard kills
Phill Ryu, a man who must have some sort of direct neural interface with the Mac shareware community, has posted a list of applications which could very likely be killed off by features of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which were announced yesterday. Seasoned OS X users will have immediately seen parallels between many of the new Leopard features and software that has been available for some time. Most obviously, Spaces are just fancy names for virtual desktops; something that can be easily achieved by VirtueDesktops, DesktopManager, and VirtualDesktop Pro. The new application launching features of Spotlight take aim at popular applications such as LaunchBar, Butler, and my personal favorite of OS X applications, Quicksilver. With iChat, tabs kill off Chax, live presentations kill off ShowMacster, and backgrounds kill of ChatFX.Be sure to click through to the original post for all the other apps now lining up at the unemployment window, and to see what the shareware developers themselves have to say about the announcements.Update: Buddy'o'mine and BarCamp mastermind Chris Messina has a similar post.
