This week I’ve had two separate geekfests… one with my mates Stuart and Pete, and the other with my buddy Alex. I usually learn lots from these guys as:

• Stuart is into gadgets and “stuff” – he used to know Mac things but does more Windows work these days.
• Pete knows a lot about coding (and now lives on the west coast of California).
• Alex teaches me about CSS, web standards and using my Mac – this week it was dumping 10 years’ worth of Mac operator experience into a couple of hours teaching me how to use Quark XPress 6.5, Adobe Photoshop CS 2 and Acrobat to get a feature about the proposal to build a wind farm close to our town ready for the local community magazine.

Now Alex is always telling me that he has nothing to write for his blog but based on the amount of “stuff” I learn every time we get together he should start blogging more. This time, aside from the XPress/Photoshop/Acrobat lesson, it was introducing me to VirtueDesktops for the Mac – now I’m hooked. Linux users may be familiar with the workspace switcher, VirtueDesktops gives me that for Mac OS X, with customisable effects as I transition between desktops (I love the cube transition).

The 0.x version number indicates that this is still pre-release software and it does have the odd glitch where a window gets left behind on another desktop but I’m finding it so useful to keep mail, browsing, coding/design and other stuff on separate desktops, all just a keyboard shortcut away, that I can’t see me dumping this utility for a while!