Whenever someone joins the team, we get them to go through a somewhat laborious process of setting up the same development environment the rest of us use. One element of that is VirtueDesktop.
This is a great tool allowing Mac users to simply rotate the screen from virtual desktop to virtual desktop. It looks stunning to people that have never seen it, and for the developers it’s a simply fantastic productivity tool. We can have desktops set up for browsing the web, checking mail, writing code and much more.
I was just finishing off setting up my personal Mac at home and wandered over to the Virtue homepage where I found out that the developer has decided to terminate the project.
“Needless to say, it wasn’t easy to make this call – I’ve loved working on Virtue, and I think it has some features that Spaces won’t match. The sad fact is, that since June last year, it has all been effort poured into a product that has no future.“
The reason for this is of course “Spaces”, a virtual desktop feature that’s due to ship with Leopard, the next version of MacOS. I’m sad to see Virtue go, and I honestly think this decision is a bad one. There’s always space for competition, even when it’s against features included in the OS. I hope he reconsiders, but in the event that he doesn’t I want to add my voice to the others out there and say it will be a crying shame to see you go, and thanks so much for everything you gave us in the past.
Damn.. I love VirtueDesktop, I even showed it to someone (he spied me using it) in SFO’s waiting lounge a few months ago – he absolutely coveted it, downloaded it and loved it – all in the space of about 5 minutes.
Comment by Michael Ossareh — April 4, 2007 @ 4:25 am |
I’d love to hear more about that “laborious process” — what makes up your development environment? Which parts are most necessary and which can people compromise on?
Comment by Al Lang — April 4, 2007 @ 2:24 pm |