Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Spaces: Your Free Quad-Display Mac

Exposé made a big splash when it debuted in Mac OS X 10.3. But Leopard offers another radical step forward in window management that you may even come to prefer. It's called Spaces.

This feature gives you two, four, six, eight, or even sixteen full-size monitors. Ordinarily, of course, attaching so many screens to a single computer would be a massively expensive proposition, not to mention the number it would do on your living space and personal relationships.

But the bonus monitors that Spaces gives you are virtual. They exist only in the Mac's little head. You can look at only one at a time; you switch using a keystroke, a menu, or the mouse. Instead of shuffling through your windows using Exposé, you can now leave them all spread out over a much larger virtual desktop.

Just because the Spaces screens are simulated doesn't mean they're not useful, though. You can dedicate each one to a different program or kind of program. Screen 1 might contain your email and chat windows, arranged just the way you like them. Screen 2 can hold Photoshop, with an open document and the palettes carefully arrayed. On Screen 3: your Web browser in full-screen mode.

You can also have the same program running on multiple screens—but different documents or projects open on each one.

Now, virtual screens aren't a new idea—this sort of software has been available for the Mac and Windows for years. But it's never before been a standard feature of an operating system, and rarely ...