- Posted by reggie on August 26, 2008
Like most Windows devs I really like the Sysinternals family of products. So when I caught wind this morning of a new product called Desktops that creates a virtual workspace of up to 4 desktops I just knew it was the product I was looking for. Well, it sort of is.
You can't ask for an easier installation. Unzip it and drop it on a folder and run it. In the dialog that appears you can select whether to run it at startup. Here's a shot of that dialog.
It has a nice selection of options to select which desktop you are using but sadly it doesn't support the most important one -- the arrow keys! Someone who is using virtual desktop software is enough of a power user that they will want to switch desktops on-the-fly without looking at the keyboard. Sure I can whack a number key without looking but the T-shape arrow keypad just fits with the metaphor a bit better. A simple Ctrl+Shift+Arrow would do the trick.
The other problem is the speed. It's a bit slow and has no nice swipes or transitions but it is free software so I'm really not griping about that too much.
All in all a welcome bit of software. Thanks Mark!