GoKawiilTwo decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together.
TLDR; I built an app to return macOS spaces to its Pre-Lion Grid-enabled Glory. Read on for the increasingly rare experience of an actual human dropping a bit of nostalgia, the thinking behind why make this and some issues encountered along the way. Or just download it here
2006
Around the time I was experimenting with Japanese toilets, I was also experimenting with desktop operating systems. I had spent most of my developer career up to that point using Windows but had begun trying desktop Linux and then macOS after a popular presentation enticed me enough to buy a Mac just so I could start using TextMate.
Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration but funnily enough I don’t remember continuing to use it for very long. Other editors quickly caught up but I stayed with macOS. My career also moved into iOS development so it wasn’t really a choice after that. In any case one thing from that era did stay with me long term.
macOS Leopard Spaces
The big OS release in 2006 was macOS 10.5 Leopard. It had a bunch of feature releases, the most notable probably being Time Machine. But 20 years on I still don’t use nor miss Time Machine. I miss what John Sciracusa’s epic review labelled a grab bag item. I miss Spaces.
Spaces introduced virtual desktops to macOS and allowed you to arrange them in a customisable grid. Anyone who has used virtual desktops in this way knows the benefit. It allows you to treat them like actual displays in spatial locations. I always favoured a 3x3 grid and treated it like I had 9 screens. Centre screen was my web browser, the screen above my web editor so I could flip back and forth with a single key press. Top left was Xcode, the screen below the iOS simulator. The other screens had other allocated applications/purposes that I don’t exactly remember (mail/itunes/chat etc…) but the benefits were obvious, I could move from one screen to another without thinking, it became muscle memory like I was looking at actual separate physical displays.
I found this grid layout so useful I ended up incorporating it into other applications I built, the grid of 16 sequencing screens you could navigate in my Drum Machine EasyBeats was directly inspired by Apple’s screens.
2011 macOS Lion
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