Posts Tagged ‘Spaces’

How to Use Spaces in Snow Leopard

December 16th, 2009

Many Snow Leopard users are unfamiliar with the feature called ‘Spaces’ in Snow Leopard, and that’s sad. In my opinion, Spaces was one of the best features in Leopard and it hasn’t of course been thrashed in Snow Leopard, but many Snow Leopard users doesn’t take advantage of the feature, and that can only be because they doesn’t know how to use it.

If you are one of the mentioned, that doesn’t know how to use Spaces in Snow Leopard, we have made this video to show you how you use it:

Configure Spaces

Spaces can be configured the way you want it, as you can see on the video above. To configure Spaces, just enter System Preferences, by clicking the Apple icon in your upper left corner, and then ‘Preferences’ as you can see below (click to enlarge).

System Preferences Button

Then head for the ‘Exposé and Spaces’ button

Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 15.50.15

… and then the window below will appear

Spaces configuration

Here you can adjust Spaces as you want. You can choose up to 16 Spaces, and if you have two screens in your screen arrangement you will now have 32 different ‘desktops’ or ‘work spaces’  instead of two.

In the Spaces Preferences, you can choose if you like cmd, alt or ctrl to switch between spaces, while directing with the arrow keys or the number keys. You can also choose which F-button you like to activate Spaces (to see all spaces at once). Standard key for this function is F8.

How do I use it?

I use Spaces all the time. I like to play a game called Football Manager, but I want to surf the internet and chat with my friends at the same time. My solution is, that I have my game in Space 1, my Mail application in Space 2, Internet in Space 3, and in Space 4 I have Adium and iChat.

Since I have two screen in my arrangement (the one that’s on my MacBook Pro and a separate 19″ screen), I can control two applications at once in just one Space, and if I want to listen to music in iTunes, I just open iTunes in the Space that I use the most (probably the one with Football Manager ;-) ) and then drag it to the screen that doesn’t run the application I use.

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Snow Leopard review compilation – Mac OS X 10.6

October 6th, 2009

Shortly after the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, we wrote a longer review of the OS, which we split in seven posts due to the length. This is simply a compilation of those posts, so you can get the full picture of the review.

snowleopardbox

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 1
- First impressions and the upgrade

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 2
- Spaces, system preferences and dock

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 3
- Quicktime Player X

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 4
- Around in the corners
- Startup and shutdown times
- Chinese handwriting for multi-touch trackpads

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 5
- Printers & trackpad character recognition
- Dictionary & Preview
- Microsoft Exchange & iCal

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 6
- Boot Camp
- Screensaver & incompatibility

Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 7
- What can iChat do?
- Ok, but what’s new about iChat in Snow Leopard?
- Conclusion

So that’s the entire review. Now go ahead and read it if you wish, and enjoy your lunch!

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Heard of it, caught and tamed it – Review of Snow Leopard, part 2

August 29th, 2009

Yesterday, we provided you with our very first impressions of the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Today we will go a little further and write about what is new in the Mac OS X Snow Leopard. We have already showed you how the new stacks feature works, but there are many other features in Mac OS 10.6.

Spaces, system preferences and dock

If you are one of those who upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard, which you actually can, you are probably a rookie when it comes to the feature called ‘Spaces’. Spaces allows you to have up to 16 different work spaces, which the video beneath will show you:

If you didn’t notice in the video above, there is something new about the ‘System Preferences’ window. It isn’t that important, but it’s new and deserves some space in this article: the ‘keyboard and mouse’ preferences has been split into two single buttons as you can see on the picture below.

System Preferences

If you click the keyboard button, you can see a list of keyboard shortcuts that you can use in different applications and you can add new shortcuts to applications too.

Another new feature in the new Mac OS X is, that you can minimize windows into the application window. That is very useful if you don’t like your dock to be kilometers long or if you just love to be organized. The ‘minimize into dock’ function can be activated through the dock preferences in ‘System Preferences’.

If you can’t find a specific window, you can use Exposé. This function has been improved in Snow Leopard. When you activate Exposé, the windows are now arranged in a grid. A new feature in Exposé is that if you left click and hold an open application icon in the dock, Exposé shows you all windows from the specific application that are currently open or minimized, even if it is placed in another space.

Today, we have covered some of the new features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard and tomorrow we will take a look at QuickTime Player, which has also been improved a lot.

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