I started using Spaces the other day for the first time. This is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that allows you to set up four or more virtual screens, known as spaces. You can also dedicate the windows from specific applications to a specific spaces.
So far Spaces has worked wonderfully for me. I have one space for productivity apps like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, and Adium, my instant messaging client. My second space is for blogging and includes MarsEdit and a bunch of browser windows. My third space is for software development and includes things like Zend Studio, Colloquy (an IRC client), and more browser windows. I may use my fourth space for image editing. I opened Pixelmator in it to write this article.
It was easy to dedicate most applications to their appropriate space. Clicking the “+” button below the “Application Assignments” scrollable area brought up a file selection dialog. I simply located the application I wanted to work with in my “Applications” folder and clicked the “Add” button.
The big question I had when setting this up was, how do I make my Finder windows appear in more than one space? This is because the Finder is not in my Applications folder and I didn’t know where to find it.
After Googling around for a little while, I found an article called Nice Leopard Finder/Spaces tip on the Undulattice blog that answered my question. It turns out that the Finder is located in the “System” directory tree under “Library” and then under “Core Services”.
I set the Finder to appear in all spaces. Now it shows up in my blogging space so I can drop files into the MarsEdit Media Manager, and in the development space so I can make changes to the Apache directory tree on my MacBook Pro.