MacOSX 10.5.3 spaces improvement

John Gruber describes a new Spaces option on his Blog that appeared in the recent 10.5.3 release. Like John, I'm also task oriented, not application oriented. For me, this means I want terminals and firefoxes on all spaces, related to the task I'm working on.

The workaround at macosxhints.com worked fine for me. It disabled the annoying switching when selecting an application in the Dock, which means I can just select an application, hit command-n to get a new window, and use it locally related to the task. Unfortunately I did have to switch manually for the few application oriented spaces like Chat and Mail, but it was acceptable.

But the new setting makes things slightly better. A new option has appeared in the Exposé & Spaces preference Pane, "When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application" which is the traditional behavioud (which is why it's selected by default). Deselecting it, and undoing the macosxhints.com essentially gives the same task-oriented behaviour I want, with an added bonus: If you click an icon twice in the doc, Spaces will switch to its space. This means that a single click on Firefox allows me to open a new browser, and a clicking twice on Mail will bring me to my "mail space". Note that you need to click twice, first to select the application, then to switch to its space. Double-clicking won't work!

Additionally, selecting a specific window using right-click on the Dock icon also now works as expected (by switching to that specific window in stead).