A nice conceptual product, but not worth $20

Pros: This is the ONLY product that I have seen so far that will actually let you play a few videos simultaneously in your 3D space. The are not just inconified snapshots of the video, they all independently play.

Hovering a mouse pointer over a window gives you information about the process that is running in the 3D space. That tells me that this program doesn't just create a little thumbnail of a process, but it actually updates information about that process.

Navigation around the interface is simple. You can zoom closer to center and away from center. You can click any panel you have on the screen and it will change your point of view to focus on it. Going back to center is 2 quick clicks.

This program appears to have a lot of potential if this company chooses to continue to develop it.

Cons: This software lacks documentation, has no forum, no knowledgebase, and just has an email address at the site to email if you encounter a problem or have a question. So, it is supported, but it probably just isnt as popular as other software of this type. That's fine, but it means that it might take longer to get your answers sometimes.

Let me be fair and say that this software does have a help menu that covers the basics, but it definitely is incomplete documentation. You will not find any information as to how to move the panels that your background apps will be sitting on, or adjust their points of view, etc.

Spaces has a memory leak when you run a video as your background. I left my computer running for about 5 hours while I was away and spaces.exe consumed over 700 megs of RAM and was still eating more memory as the background video continued to play. I stopped the background video from playing and the memory leak stopped, but it didnt release the memory until it was restarted.

There is no support in the interface itself to launch a new application. You will need to launch your apps from the windows desktop itself or start a new program from something like task manager. You can't put shortcuts on the spaces desktop to launch a program.

An average user will not be able to customize anything beyond the basic layout in this 3D workspace. The configuration files that the program actually reads to render your 3D space are XML files that you would have to figure out. There are quite a few parameters in the XML files with no description for the things you can change to adjust the layout. Basically, what they give you onscreen to change (background image, colors, background shape and point of view adjustment) is all you get.

You need to have a panel to place a process on, and you have to manually hack the XML files to figure out how to add a panel for more usable space in your 3D desktop. Why they didn't bother to program an interface to let you add panels and position them is a mystery to me.

Posted: 31-Jan-2005 08:01:32 AM