Software good enough to pay for!

So yes, as you’ll no doubt know I have turned to the ‘cappuccino’ side. I had been wanting a small handy laptop for a while and when pointed out PC World had iBooks for under £500, well, I was straight down after work before I could worry about the one mouse button. So yes, the keyboard layout is a little odd and you have to know to press option-3 to get a # but its strangely easy to adapt.

The whole MacOSX 10.3 (Panther) experience is damn fine too. Everything thus far “just works” and besides the lack of manual (like how was I to know you could drag and drop stuff on and off the dock? ;)) I’m getting on just fine (thanks to for being my manual BTW!). Two things bug me though; Firstly, on a 12″ screen things get cluttered easily and whilst Expose is pretty neat its not the virtual desktops I’ve become accustomed to over the years on Linux/XFree86/FVMW2. Secondly I am just so damn used to Mouse-Move-To-Focus I’ve been fluffing typing between applications which is starting to really niggle at me. So I was pleased when a colleague pointed me to CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop Pro.

CTVD was only supposed to be a virtual desktop app, thats all I was told about it. Its also not free, but there is a 15 day trail. Might as well try it I though, so I downloaded and registered. So, whilst flicking though the setup and options tabs I was somewhat surprised (very pleasantly so!) to find a Mouse-Move-To-Focus tick box with a “no auto-raise” option too. Whoop! So, several other neat sounding options later (like an autohiding pager) I gave CTVD a whirl.

Well I must say I am very impressed. It all just works, it does just what you expect. Expose still works, clicking on dock items flicks you to the correct desktop and nothing’s crashed. Software worth buying? Now I’m kind of used to getting the source, compiling and not having to worry to much about licensing issues, so paying for software is not something I’m used to. But damnit, CTVD is good, so good I’ve bought software for the first time in years! All you Mac users need it, you really do!