Spaces

It’s good to have your own space

Clutter is something that computers are great at. And the fact that you can have open a browser, iTunes, iPhoto, a few finder windows means that before you know it, your screen can be awash with clutter. The frustration of clicking through windows to find the one that you want to actually get to is both time wasting and inefficient. Is there anything that can help you?

What to do:

Firstly, open System Preferences, and find the button that says Exposé and Spaces.

Once you’ve pressed that, you should see the options for spaces.

Click on “Enable Spaces” and if you wish “Show Spaces in menu bar”. From the picture above you can see that there are 4 “screens”. Each of these screens can hold different windows.

Watch the video below to see an example of spaces in action:

As you can see, once you’ve enabled spaces, you can have 4 separate “monitors” where you can drop different programs into. You can activate spaces with a hotkey, or use the spaces icon in your menubar to jump to a specific space.

Here you can see a couple of things. Firstly, I have set up certain programs to open up in specific spaces. That can easily be done by pressing the “+” sign, adding the program and then assigning a space to that program. At the bottom, you can set a hotkey to show all your spaces at one go.

This is one of the features of my Mac I use almost without thinking, and one of those features I miss most when I use a computer that’s not my own!