This post may come across as blasphemous to ardent Mac fanatics, but I am hoping that OSX users who are in the same predicament as me may find it useful.

I have finally disabled Spaces on Mac OSX. It’s a little painful to disable it, because I had considered it a very crucial feature, considering that without it the desktop gets cluttered quickly with the way the Mac OS presents applications and their respective windows (all mixed together in one very confusing bucket). However, the slide animation that occurs every time Spaces switches from one space to another has become really nauseating.

It was cool at first, but now it is painful to watch.

So much for Apple’s acclaimed emphasis on the “user experience”. Does nobody in the UX team ever stop to think that not everyone likes gimmicky animation stuff for frequent tasks, and there should be an easy way to disable such animations? Unfortunately, there is just no way to disable the animations – I hope to be proven wrong, but my searches have come up fruitless. A quick google visit shows there are other users who wish to get rid of the animation too (and apparently I am not the only one suffering from motion sickness, although most simply want to get rid of the animation just to save time, keeping multitasking slick and snappy).

So, now that I have disabled Spaces, what do I do now with the cluttered desktop? I am currently solving the issue with a little AppleScript and implementation of keyboard shortcuts via Spark – a free utility to create Hot Keys to launch applications and documents, execute AppleScript, etc.

First, you can use simple AppleScript to hide all other applications except the one you are working on:

tell application "Finder"
	set visible of every process whose visible is true and frontmost is not true to false
end tell

If you are already using a Hot Key utility to execute other AppleScript, you already know the routine. If not, you can download Spark, launch it, and then assign the above AppleScript to a keyboard shortcut.

(click on the Shortcut input field and then type the keyboard shortcut to assign the Hot Key)

With the above, F1 has been assigned as the Hot Key – pressing F1 when any application has focus will hide all other windows except the currently active application (or in AppleScript’s terminology, “frontmost” application).

But that only got rid of the clutter, albeit momentarily (as the clutter builds up, I hit F1 again).

What about jumping around applications? That was what Spaces allowed me to do, and now I need to replicate that functionality. Luckily, it is easy enough to do that with Spark. You can once again write AppleScript, such as the following:

tell application "Finder"
	set visible of every process to false
end tell
 
tell application "Xcode"
	activate
	set visible to true
end tell

However, you don’t even need to do that – Spark allows you to assign Hot Keys to Applications, so let’s do that:

As you can see, the above assigns Command-F1 to Xcode, and Command-F2 to Firefox. With that set up, when you are in another application, hitting Command-F1 will jump to Xcode immediately. If Xcode is not yet launched, it will automatically launch first. Spark also provides the options for hiding all applications when your desired program is launched:

So, that is that. A little manual work to assign frequently used applications to Hot Keys. But at least it no longer gets dizzy working on Mac OSX now.

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