Hyperspaces is the ultimate way to customise Apple’s Spaces. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering which space you’re in, then Hyperspaces is for you!
- Backgrounds: Set individual desktop images for each of your spaces.
- Labels: Give each of your spaces a name, then show it on your desktop and in your menubar.
- Colours: Set a colour for each space, and watch the desktop image slowly fade from colour to colour as you switch between your spaces.
- Switch: Use the Hyperspaces switcher to visually move through your spaces using the keyboard or the mouse.
- Hotkeys: Set-up personalised hotkeys for common actions:
- Switching directly to a space;
- Adding and removing spaces on the fly;
- And many more!
Hyperspaces was recently recommended by Take Control Ebooks as part of their Take Control of Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard publication.
Download
You can download a demo of Hyperspaces 1.0 right now, and customise the first three of your spaces! If you’d like to customise more than three spaces, you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version .
Requirements
Hyperspaces requires an Intel-based or PowerPC-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.7 — the faster, the better!
I’d also recommend a video card with at least 256Mb memory if you’re planning on using custom desktop images — Core Animation really chews through your video memory!
Support
My name is Tony Arnold, and I develop Hyperspaces - if you’d like to ask me a question, you’re welcome to e-mail me - otherwise, I like to use GetSatisfaction.com to keep in contact and manage any support issues.
Release notes
The current release is Hyperspaces 1.0 beta 9, which is a pre-release version — I'm ironing out the last few bugs. Here are the changes from the last beta:
New and fixed features
- New Full support for Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard";
- Fix Next/Previous space hotkeys will now wrap from the first space to the last space, and vice versa;
- Fix Hyperspaces can now be shown in the Dock, and hidden in the status bar;
- Fix Restored the ability to turn the menu bar transparency on and off for each space;
- New When desktop icons are hidden, you can double-click on the desktop to open a new finder window;
- New Under Advanced in the preferences, you can now tell Hyperspaces to set your system desktop picture when changing spaces. This means that the correct image will show through your translucent menu bar (see below for known issues). Many thanks to Joe Ranieri for the reverse engineering fu that happened here!;
- New You can now disable Desktop Backgrounds / Core Animation entirely - this is done via the "Advanced" preferences;
- Fix Many other bug fixes and optimisations.
Known issues
- Hyperspaces is moving to a newer, more consistent preference format in this build and will migrate your preferences to the newer format;
- Tiled and stretched images do not line up with their system desktop counterparts.
- The desktop label alignment view sometimes does not draw - just select another space in the preferences, and it should come back.
- Desktop tint colours occasionally cause Hyperspaces to crash.
- The preferences window goes behind all other windows when changing spaces.
- Space labels sometimes show up on application start, even after you've told them not to. Changing spaces or toggling the enabled status in the preferences makes the label go away again.