The Workspaces Icon
Location in the BeOS:
/beos/preferences/Workspaces

Workspaces is your window to virtual worlds

Too often, our lives are filled with clutter. While in the dark ages, this clutter could be easily spread across desks and stacked into precarious piles, in the digital world, it's not always that easy. Not all of us are fortunate enough to own 25" monitors that can easily handle the array of programs/windows we have open at once - a few text documents, a couple of web browsers, a half dozen email messages, etc. The Workspaces preference offers a virtual solution to this situation.

Launch Workspaces from the Preferences folder. You'll see nine squares, arranged in a 3-by-3 matrix. Put an "X" in the center square. No wait, wrong application! Actually, each square represents a "screen". You'll notice the first screen is filled with mini-versions of any windows you might have open (open some folders or programs to check this out). Now, in the Workspaces application, drag one of the windows across to the next screen. It vanishes from your current screen, but Workspaces shows it is now safely living in Workspace 2.

Switch to the second workspace by clicking in the second screen of he Workspaces application or by pressing [Alt or Command] and F2. All Workspaces can have their own color depth and resolution.

Set up email in one workspace, web browsing in another. Spreadsheets in one, games in another. For more information, see what the BeOS User's Guide has to say about setting up and using Workspaces.