I feel real lucky to be using a 30-inch display, because I need lots of space on my screen with which to get work done. Now I have to tell you that the first Mac I brought into my home (after working at an office with one for several years) came with the famous Apple 13-inch color display. But I felt constrained, because I couldn’t even place the contents of a single page in a document on the screen without reducing its size to near unreadability.

I recall that I found a system extension in those days that hacked the graphic drivers to stretch the screen slightly, to eliminate most of the telltale black border of a CRT. Sure, I could buy a larger display, but if you think today’s 30-inch models are expensive, double that price to get a 19-inch circa 1990.

Over the years, software developers have come up with “virtual desktop” software that would compartmentalize your application windows into separate locations, which you could switch to with a keystroke. Some content creators with a larger budget than I had at the time just bought multiple monitors and rejoiced in being able to put QuarkXPress on the left display and Adobe Photoshop on the right.

Well, the multiple desktop software really didn’t impress me, so I just used utilities that would automatically hide the applications you weren’t working in. Under Mac OS X, there’s AutoHide, a freebie, and a shareware variant, HideIt Control. But, as I said, they were limited to displaying a single application unless you held down a special key, usually Shift, when you switched to another application. That would allow both to occupy the same screen real estate.

In loading up on features for Leopard, Apple took the virtual desktop idea and ran with it, coming up with Spaces. Because it’s built into the system, you don’t have to contend with possible incompatibilities. Even better, they’ve made it so simple to configure and so smooth in operation that once you’ve used Spaces, you’ll never go back.

To get started, just open the Exposé & Spaces preference panel and click on the Spaces tab. From here, you’ll see a grid of four virtual desktops. You can add up to 16 by clicking the available plus signs in the Rows and Columns field. Applications can be attached to a single space or all spaces.

My initial setup took maybe three or four minutes. From then on, when I click on an application’s icon in the Dock or launch it, I’m automatically switched to the appropriate desktop in a fancy visual flourish, typical of Apple. It all happens in a flash, even quicker than those application hiding utilities. I’m impressed.

In my situation, I configured spaces by category, and I suspect that will represent the most common setup scheme. The applications I use to produce my radio shows reside on one desktop, writing in another, browsing in a third, plus separate screens for iChat, Mail and the rest.

In all, I configured 12 Spaces environments, and, after using it a while, I moved applications from one to the other until, as they say in the fairy tale, everything was just right.

If you have forgotten where you’ve placed things, and that’s understandable, the F8 keystroke will invoke all of your chosen desktops in a single screen, in an Exposé-style layout, and you can drag and drop your applications to the appropriate location. A quick perusal of Apple’s Help menu will provide more options and shortcuts for Spaces, so I urge you to look it over and consider the various possibilities. Even though Spaces is easy to use, it is quite sophisticated in its execution, as you’ll learn soon enough.

In regular use, Spaces is pretty benign. Other than the visual effect, you hardly know it’s running. It’s not quite trouble-free, however. In some situations, I’ll move to a new desktop while an application is launching, and it’ll suddenly appear in the wrong place. I’ve also run into a situation on several occasions where switching to an application delivers a blank desktop, with no windows on display. Annoying? You bet.

I’ve duplicated this troubling symptom on a PowerPC and Intel-based Mac, so I suspect I’m either doing something wrong or too quickly — and I have no idea what — or there is a bug in Spaces that Apple needs to address. I’m voting for the latter.

There are two solutions, other than simply restarting your Mac. One is to bring up the Spaces Exposé display with the F8 shortcut, and click on the desktop you want. That step doesn’t eliminate the problem; it just allows you to bypass it. The other step does zap the symptoms, and it involves going to the Utilities folder, and launching Activity Monitor.

With Activity Monitor running, select Dock, choose Quit Process from the application’s window and select Quit from the confirmation dialog. Your Dock will disappear and restart itself, after which Spaces will behave normally. Yes, Spaces is, like Dashboard, connected to the Dock.

I’m sure some of the Mac troubleshooting sites will make a huge deal of this singular problem, but I regard it as minor, and the fix is trivial. More to the point, there will be that inevitable 10.5.1 update before long, where I’ve little doubt that this and perhaps other Leopard issues will be resolved.

Regardless, I love Spaces. And I’ve retired all of those auto-hiding utilities for good.

As I’ve said so many times — and I bet some of you are bored — I’m a devout believer in the backup religion. Whenever I create mission-critical files, such as interviews for my two radio shows, I make two backups immediately. Take that literally. I will even postpone a bathroom visit to start the process, because most of those interviews are one-of-a-kind events, and I do not wish to be forced to repeat the process. And that assumes the guest is gracious enough for another go-round.

In addition to the immediate backup, I’ve been using SuperDuper! for clone backups on my extra drives. However, the current version of this application is not quite Leopard compatible, so, for the time being at least, I’ve decided to subsist on manual file backups and, of course, Apple’s Time Machine.

Now, aside from the fancy (and perhaps overdone) 3D visual effects, the concept behind Time Machine is based on common sense. Most Mac users don’t backup files, and of those that do, only a small number actually try backup software.

I don’t pretend to understand the psychology behind this posture of benign neglect. It’s not as if the best backup applications are hard to use. SuperDuper!, for example, easily guides you through the process, which is hardly more difficult than selecting your source drive and your backup (or target) drive, and picking a backup option. SuperDuper! does the rest without fuss or bother and it can, if you prefer, quit the application, put your Mac to sleep or shut it down once the backup is done.

Sounds easy to me, but I gather it’s just not easy enough for many of you, and that’s really sad!

With Apple’s Time Machine, when you plug in an extra drive, you get a dialog box asking if you want to use it for your backups. That’s it. Time Machine does the rest.

The initial backup may take several hours, depending on how much data you have. But it’s all done in the background and, aside from a Finder progress bar, you never know it’s happening. Once the backup is concluded, Time Machine will perform incremental backups each hour to capture the files you’ve changed or added. You’ll see a spinning circular arrow in the Finder for the device to which you’re backing up, but again, aside from the usual sounds made by a hard drive in action, you shouldn’t notice any performance degradation. Of course, if you’re using a 3D rendering application, it may present an issue, but that remains to be seen.

In any case, I’m sure many of you have seen the widely-circulated demonstration about using Time Machine to recover lost files. In effect, you cross the frontiers of the universe, visually of course, to return your Mac to the state a certain folder was in when that file was still available.

Unfortunately, Time Machine suffers from some version 1.0 shortcomings. The most critical is the annoying process of restoring your Mac in the event of a hard drive failure. For that, you have to restart your Mac with your Leopard DVD and use it to engage Time Machine to bring the contents of your hard drive back to life, either on the same drive, a replacement drive, or another Mac.

Some of the more severe critics suggest the process simply takes too long, but I submit that restoring tens of gigabytes of data is going to be a lengthy process regardless.

I also understand why you wouldn’t want to restore by starting up with the same drive you’re using to bring back the entire contents of your backup. But wouldn’t it make sense for Time Machine to, perhaps, create a bootable system or partition on the backup drive, so you can restart from that drive in order to restore your system? What happens if your Leopard DVD isn’t readily available? Maybe it was misplaced, or the boss, with the proper degree of paranoia, places software media in a safe. The boss is off for a “business meeting” in the Bahamas, and you’re stuck. Do you get the picture?

Power users will also rightly criticize Apple for failing to provide some level of granularity in Time Machine’s options. Say you want to skip a scheduled backup, perhaps because you don’t want your system to be busy while performing a 3D rendering operation. Perhaps you’d like to completely override Time Machine’s built-in settings. I’m sure you could do some Terminal trickery to accomplish that task, and I’m just as certain that third parties will soon provide simple graphical tools to simplify the process.

Over time, all this shall pass. As you recall, lots of people criticized the first iteration of Spotlight in Tiger for its lack of Boolean searching, and inconsistent performance. That’s just how things are, and as Apple gets input from people like you about Time Machine’s shortcomings, I’m sure some of those concerns will be addressed in future versions of Mac OS X.

It may even be possible for it to happen earlier, assuming something of the sort can be seamlessly grafted into a maintenance update.

As a concept and an initial release, however, Time Machine appears to be just the ticket to convince people who just won’t backup their data that it’s time to change their ways. Sure, maybe they’ll have to buy an external drive, but that’s money well spent.

When some of you first saw the Leopard version of the menu bar, I bet there were a few grumbles about its near-invisibility with some screen backdrops. Indeed, I suppose Apple’s interface designers took the hint and made it less transparent as time passed. At least, that’s what it seems based upon what Steve Jobs presented at the last WWDC and the finished product released last week.

So if you stick with the standard space travel motif that represents the heart of the Time Machine interface, the menu bar remains gray, with a slight level of translucency, and the labels are all clearly visible. The same holds true with the traditional Mac OS X ocean blue background. Some colors, however, may present obstacles to proper menu bar display, and you just might not want to use them, at least until Apple or someone provides a tool to kill the transparency effect. But even if Apple doesn’t come through for you, a third party will take care of it for you, because there are lots of things buried in the system that you can access via the appropriate command line, courtesy of Terminal.

In the scene of things, however, the menu bar doesn’t annoy me at all, nor am I married to a particular desktop design, but let’s move on to something that actually polarizes millions of Mac users.

Yes, I’m talking about the infamous Dock, which, as most of you know, is descended from the original NeXT Dock. Now to be perfectly fair, the NeXT computer attained a special, almost mystical, status among Mac users in the late 1980s and early 1990s, even though it was a total failure in the marketplace. There were lots of system add-ons that mimicked portions of the NeXT user interface, such as The Black Box from Andrew Welch.

Now of course, most of you know Andrew from his shareware company, Ambrosia Software, and the great Mac-only games and utilities he’s delivered over the years. These days, I’ve become a fan of one of their newest products, WireTap Studio, which combines a sound capturing application with fancy post-production features for editing your audio recordings.

Well, in those days, The Black Box brought the NeXT Dock and other interface niceties to the Mac platform. It stands to reason that, when the NeXT look and feel was combined with the Mac OS, some of the components of the former would appear in the latter.

When I first wrote about the Dock for CNET when the Mac OS X Public Beta appeared in 2000, my editor added the descriptive phrase, “cartoonish, goofy” to my article. That alteration, however, didn’t accurately relfect my personal viewpoint. In fact, the Dock never bothered me at all, and I was perfectly content to leave it at the bottom of the screen. I know some of you prefer to have it placed on the left or right ends your Mac’s desktop, but I like it just like it is, with the icons sufficiently large so I can tell one from the other.

With the arrival of Leopard, lots of you are complaining — with clear justification mind you — that the Mac OS 10.5 Dock, with its shelf and 3D-style reflections, is nothing more than a useless piece of eye candy. It is no more functional than the previous versions. It just looks different. In fact, the blue globes below an application that are supposed to show they’re running are often difficult to see, but I don’t agree. Once your eyes become accustomed to the new look, you will find the new order perfectly acceptable.

If not, just take a trip to the Terminal and enter the following commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

Once you press Return, the Dock will restart, and will become 2D, very much in the fashion of the Tiger Dock. Or just move it to the left or right side of the screen, which conveys the self-same visual effect. Happy now?

Now other than its well-known performance hangups, I was always a fan of the Mac OS X Finder, particularly its column view feature, another NeXT influence. But you had to agree that performance could be pathetic under load, particularly when performing multiple copying operations.

From a performance standpoint, the Leopard Finder is a huge improvement. Not perfect mind you, but far fewer spinning beachballs, evidently the result of superior multithreading. The new file sharing scheme is also a revelation, because it makes both volume and screen sharing a piece of cake, hardly worth a trip to a Help menu. Compare that to Microsoft’s inability to figure out how to explain Windows networking without a pathetic setup wizard. What’s more, if a network share drops off the network, it doesn’t affect the Leopard Finder one bit. That’s also a huge plus.

Yet the critics still aren’t happy. The Finder’s blue/gray look is dull, drab, lacking sufficient contrast between the background and the various labels. Again, I just don’t agree. To me, the Finder is simple, elegant, fast and easy to manage.

Where Apple and I part company is the new flat desktop folder scheme, subtly embossed to indicate the ones with special purposes. The problem is that you have to look twice, or maybe three times, to see that embossing, so the subtle look’s purpose is defeated. This is a trivial issue in the scheme of things, however. All Apple has to do is fix the various image files to look more distinctive, and I’m sure third parties will deal with it soon enough.

At the same time, I understand that many of you aren’t enamored with these and other elements of the Leopard interface. Unfortunately, whatever Apple does, they can’t please everyone. But if they get enough negative feedback, they eventually get the message, and don’t be surprised if there are a few changes here and they way before Mac OS 10.6 appears.

You just knew it had to happen. Within a day or two after Apple releases a major product or product enhancement, all bets are off. The ugly face of whatever it is they delivered comes to the surface, and, before long, you begin to wonder how such an abject failure can actually succeed — until you begin to separate facts from fiction of course.

Now most of you know that I have written several fiction books with my son, Grayson, and a lot of factual books and articles too. So I think I know how to separate one from the other, but I sometimes wonder if others have the same set of values.

Take a headline I read this week from Jason O’Grady’s PowerPage site, where he points his readers to an article he co-authored with David Morgenstern over at ZDNet, a CNET affiliate, entitled “Apple says to Archive and Install Leopard.”

Now, if you take the statement at face value, which I expect most readers might do until they read the fine print, it clearly asserts that Apple is admitting that the standard Upgrade Mac OS X installation scenario for Leopard won’t work, so you must use the semi-clean “Archive & Install” method instead.

But when you read the actual details, you find that it’s just not so. In its Knowledge Base document on the subject, Apple is actually addressing a small minority of installations where a third-party system enhancement, probably an older version of Unsanity’s Application Enhancer, may cause a blue screen of death when you restart your Mac after performing an Upgrade installation of Leopard.

The solutions include reinstalling Leopard with the Archive & Install method, or using the Terminal to zap the offending system extender. But that’s mostly a case of closing the barn door after the cows have departed. The real solution is just to remove your third party system goodies before you install Leopard. Some of these utilities have uninstallers. Others, mostly the ones that fiddle with Mac OS X’s hidden settings, such as TinkerTool, include the capability of restoring your system to its default settings, and you should definitely take that step if you don’t find an obvious removal method of the software itself. That is, besides just throwing out the application, of course.

Either way, that should remove the the most obvious threat of a startup failure. So the headline for that article from O’Grady and Morgenstern is not just misleading, but dead wrong except in cases where you forgot to remove the third-party system enhancement.

In fact, other than defective hardware or a corrupted hard drive, you can probably blame most Mac OS X update troubles on a system that’s been manipulated via Terminal trickery, or by adding a third-party toy. It’s a word to the wise, and should be considered before you throw caution to the wind and proceed with your installation as if nothing could possibly go wrong.

To be sure, Apple has clearly tested Leopard installations on all of their hardware, so they do — or at least should — know all about the potential downsides. In saying that, the two Leopard installations I performed for a client this weekend were simple upgrades. Nothing special, because I knew he hadn’t done any nasty things to his operating system’s guts. As I expected, it was flawless in every respect, as I suspect most Leopard installations of that sort will be.

The other concerns I have concern the recent instructions about installing Leopard on unsupported hardware. Yes, perhaps your Power Mac with a pair of 800MHz processors will work as well or better than a single 867MHz chip after you install Leopard. But for whatever reason — and certainly selling new hardware has to be a part of it — Apple chose that specific line of demarcation.

If you dare to cross it in some fashion, such as accessing that Mac’s startup drive via FireWire Target Disk mode from a Mac that’s certified for Leopard, the installation may succeed without any problems. If the specs of that Mac are close enough to the minimum requirements — and you have lots of RAM available — you maybe perfectly happy with your Mac’s performance. Indeed, for most of you, and my own experience bears this out, Leopard is quite a slick and snappy beast.

But what happens when Apple releases the inevitable slew of system updates. For example, Login & Keychain Update 1.0 appeared the day after Leopard’s official release. I’ve little doubt that those updates will show up in the Software Update screen on one of those officially unsupported Macs. However, when you try to run the installer, don’t be surprised if you get the message that the hardware isn’t compatible.

So what do you do then? Why of course you can probably return to the method you used to induce installation in the first place, and do all your updates manually as they show up, by downloading the files direct from Apple. I suppose that clever scheme will succeed in most cases, so perhaps there’s nothing to worry about.

But what if the Mac you used to force the original installation is not available? What if you just borrowed it from a friend to get Leopard to work on your aging Mac? What if that update fixes a critical system bug and you try to beg your friend to use his machine again, only to find he’s on a one-month vacation in Spain?

Yes, some folks will delight in telling you how to do things that you’re not supposed to be able to do. But if you depend on your Mac for your business, I would be extremely cautious about whose advice you listen to. If something goes wrong, it’s not as if you can make them pay you for the lost production.