Hyperspaces Updated

Saturday, February 14, 2009 in Macintosh by slowe | 1 comment

Hyperspaces, the application designed to extend and build upon the built-in functionality of Spaces, has been updated again. My first coverage of Hyperspaces was back in October 2008, and at that time the application still had a few rough edges. I’m happy to report that Hyperspaces seems much more polished this time around—it’s clear that Tony Arnold, the developer, has been paying attention to the details.

For example, the latest build of Hyperspaces provides an animation transition for desktop backgrounds, a feature that was lacking previously. In earlier builds, there was a jarring delay between switching desktops and the background switching as well; now, there is a nice transition from one background to the next. Much better!

Based on Tony’s comments from the first article I know that he has a number of features still in the works. I’d like to cast my vote for a pager that isn’t attached to the menu bar as the next major feature to be implemented. (I’d really love to see desktop transitions, aka the “Cube effect,” return, but something tells me that will be a lot harder than detaching the pager from the menu bar. I could be wrong, though.)

Either way, Tony, keep up the great work. Hyperspaces is looking good!

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  1. Tony Arnold’s avatar

    Tony Arnold on Saturday, February 14, 2009 at 10:16 am

    Thanks Scott! I’m pretty happy with where things are at, and I really appreciate the encouragement. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing serious optimisation (and learning one hell of a lot about Objective-C, Cocoa and GCC that I was unaware of before).

    You’re right about the transitions - they’re not going to be easy to implement, but I have some simple code samples working. When I’ve got something further working, I won’t hold back including it in Hyperspaces - I am a huge fan of the “Swap” transition!

    As for my comments in the previous article - I’ve found ways around the window API issues - sadly, they can’t help me due to further problems. I’m hopeful Snow Leopard will ease some of these problems.