Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 10th Oct 2009 19:14 UTC
Way back, when we were recovering from our hangovers from the millennium parties, Apple introduced, for the first time, Mac OS X and the Aqua user interface. This was still a preview, so it wasn't quite as polished and finished, of course. It also contained a feature that never made it into the final releases: single-window mode. Or did it...?
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Member since:
2005-07-12
Just move the others to a different desktop.
That's exactly the point: with single application mode, you don't have to move anything anywhere. Single application mode is useful if you want to concentrate on a certain work or app (e. g. writing or designing) or if you want an uncluttered view on apps (e. g. when doing drag and drop operations between two or more apps - in single app mode you start dragging, then switch the app, then drop without having to deal with unrelated windows).
With virtual desktops (or what MacOSX calls Spaces) you can 'emulate' single application mode, however this is way too cumbersome compared to single application mode in a "one app at any time" scenario.
Virtual desktops have an advantage for other usage scenarios e. g. where you work with groups of apps which are completely unrelated (e. g. a desktop for the mail client and one for a group of media production apps needed in a workflow).
I cannot imagine many scenarios where virtual desktops are more useful than other features of MacOSX (single app mode, Exposé) and I guess that's why the virtual desktops feature appears so late in the development cycle of MacOSX.