Hyperspaces for Mac is one of the most beautifully designed applications for Mac OS X. Not only is it beautiful, it actually takes a feature of OS X and makes it useful again. Surprisingly, Apple Spaces is not as useful as it could be. To me, it seems as though Apple really dropped the ball with Spaces- opting to work on other aspects of the operating system. In all honesty, the default spaces is simply unfinished.

Before Hyperspaces

Before you instal Hyperspaces, the main functionality you get out of Apple Spaces is the ability to switch between different “desktops.” However, these desktops are all the same except for one factor: the windows open. For example, if you have four spaces, you could have: Firefox open in space 1, Pages open in space 2, Keynote and TextEdit open in space 3, and iTunes open in Space 4. The key problem is that you can’t customize your desktop or easily label which space is for what, and to me, that is a big problem.

After Hyperspaces

After installing Hyperspaces, you are able to set different wallpapers or colors as backgrounds. Moreover, and especially if you’re familiar with blending modes in Photoshop, you can actually overlay colors on your desktop image and utilize various blending modes, such as color burn, overlay, darken, etc. This allows you to add a cool spin to your wallpapers, or even keep the same wallpaper but add different tints of color to it in order to distinguish your spaces even better.

Another cool feature of Hyperspaces is that it can actually label your spaces for you. By default, the label is in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen; that works fine for me, but you can change it’s location or remove it completely. Switching spaces is easy- you can use a custom keystroke, click on the icon in the dock (you can remove this in preferences), or click on the menu bar icon. One of the best features of Hyperspaces is that it allows you to setup custom keystrokes for every single action you’d ever need to perform with Spaces. In my opinion, without Hyperspaces, Apple’s default Spaces is useless.

Check out Hyperspace’s website today. A free version (limit 3 spaces) and a paid version ($19.95) are both available.

Screenshots

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