How to rename desktops under Mission Control

tmend, I took a very similar approach to yours, one step further:

Using Xcode I hacked and kludged a Cocoa app to do only this: open a window and display, in very large type, the name of the application. ("ItsMe.app" displays "ItsMe" in 144 point type.) Then I cloned this app 9 times so I have 10 distinct apps -- the maximum number of desktops I expect to ever need. Call these "marker apps".

I can change the name of each marker ap freely: for example I can rename "Itsme4.app" to "Web Dev.app", launch it, then assign that to the workspace in which I do Web work. Nice side effect: the marker app icon sits in the Dock and displays its own name on mouse-over. I can line up all such apps in the Dock and pick one to switch to the workspace I want -- the most efficient way to navigate among desktops I've found yet.

Also very helpful is that all this setup is automagically re-created by MacOS 10.7 after a reboot, so I no longer feel so bad about my weekly site maintenance shutdown. Getting back to work is _much_ easier now.

Main imperfections: In Mission Control, the marker app windows, as large as they are, still sometimes are partly or fully obscured when MC draws the desktop thumbnails. Then in any particular desktop, often the marker app window gets in the way, but only momentarily.

In sum: it would still be preferable to have a way to rename the desktops. I'd be happy with an Applescript i/f to do it. While I'm making a wish list: I think it would be good to have a way of telling at a glance which desktop is currently active, maybe by displaying its name --user-specified, of course-- at the top center of the screen, in the menu bar.

re: "If you run an application in full screen mode..." I assume you are referring to those new 10.7 apps that implement full screen mode, yes?"

That mode doesn't seem useful for my work flow/style so I've never tried it.

Does anyone know if the latest Xcode enables user-built apps to support full screen mode?

update: I tried full screen mode --for the first time-- with Safari. I see now that taking an app into that mode opens a completely new desktop/workspace named "Safari", which disappears when I exit full screen mode. It is completely independent of the desktop/workspace to which I had Safari assigned.

My thought was this: if launching an app into full screen mode updated the desktop/workspace label, and the new name "sticks", then there's a chance that launching dummy apps could be used routinely to label desktops/workspaces. Alas, the name doesn't apply a the current workspace and doesn't "stick", so this looks like a dead end.

As for the second point: I found a sample application ("GLFullScreen") for Xcode that demos full screen mode, but switching to the full screen mode of that app does not work the same way as Safari. It does not create a new desktop/workspace at all. This may be a pre-10.7 demo, i.e., a different "full screen mode". Since this approach seems hopeless, I'm not going to investigate this further.

So, thus far, it seems that there's simply no way for a user to name desktops/workspaces in 10.7.2. Maybe in 10.7.3...

I looked for a built-in text-to-JPEG utility that would allow the desktop picture(s) to be made up with useful strings (as you show) but I didn't think of adding icons. In other words, I think at least some of what you did could be at least partly automated. I didn't find any text-to-JPG utility built in to MacOS. I think ImageMagick would work, but I don't want to require adding anything to MacOS to make this work. Since this required component isn't available, I didn't try to take this any further.

In addition, based on my experience described earlier in this thread using null apps, one per space, to label the workspaces/desktops, I've just about decided that the desktop isn't really the place for such labels, either the background or any normal window above that. These simply get lost when the desktop gets busy. (A floating window might do the trick, but I've never tried it. I'm guessing that would have problems, too.) I'm hoping there's an independent place for an indicator of what desktop/workspace is currently active, say, maybe dead-center in the Menu Bar -- or just to the left of the Sherlock magnifying glass at right in the menu bar.

Has anyone checked 10.7.3 for additional scripting related to workspaces/desktops? Anything new in the recent release of Xcode?

Dakoda wrote:

While this isn't perfect, I did find a solution that's fairly easy.

That's OK, better than nothing - but still doesn't NAME them. :-(

I'd like to have named ones like -

1. Web Design

2. Images

3. Video

etc...

I agree with you, and I want similar labels. Only Apple can make it possible to label the Desktop/Workspaces to something other than "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" ... etc. etc. in Mission Control. They need to add system "hooks" and/or supply some kind of control interface, e.g. a Control Panel. Until Apple does that, those of us who want better labels are kind of stuck.

Dakoda's desktop picture idea is a reasonable workaround. I've been experimenting with another approach, but it is kind of kludgy and requires getting into tekkie-gory-details: using Xcode I created a series of applications that do nothing more than open a new window and display their own name there in a Really Large font. I named one of them "Web Work.app" . I launch that and I assign it to Desktop 2. Now, in Mission Control, if not too many other windows are open in that Desktop/Workspace and I'm lucky, I can clearly see the text "Web Work" within the grey rectangle that's labeled "Desktop 2". This generally works well with the new 10.7 "Resume" feature. After restarting, all the label apps are reopened in the correct workspaces. Occasionally, for reasons I cannot fathom, of about 9 Desktop/Workspaces I routinely maintain, one or two will fall to be restored after a system restart.

I think there may be a way to do something similar by making stand-alone apps using AppleScript, or it might be possible to use any app capable of displaying large text.

HTH

Dakoda wrote:

If you run an application in full screen mode, Spaces will automatically rename the space to the name of the full screen app.

That's what I have been doing since last July. Absolutely love Mission Control. Forgotten all about Spaces now. But I agree, a choice to rename the desktops would be a nice feature in Mountain Lion, or the next.

Good Luck

Pete

Just tried running the application in full screen mode and it does work. Thanks for that.

What I can't understand though is why, if you go to the Apple website and check the Lion OS X package, the photo that appears is that of a MacBook Air and you can see that under each desktop icon, there is the name of the specific desktop. From that picture, one could be lead to believe that it is possible to rename the desktops. Although using an application in full screen puts an icon on it and the name appears when you pass your pointer over one particular desktop, the names don't appear as they do on the Apple website.

I agree it would be practical and efficient to have named Desktops. The fact that we don't is another frustration with Lion. Much was changed from Snow Leopard and for lots of those changes I don't see a great deal of rationale. Yet there things that could have been done to benefit workflow and those changes weren't made.

Hen3ry,

Yes, you've got the right picture. I know these are the names of the full screen applications but what I was pointing at was the fact that, on that clip you've taken, the names of each desktop are there as if they were permanent while in fact, they only appear if you hover your mouse pointer over the desktop.

So you are right, this is "harmless marketing puffer", but it's still misleading.

Anyway, I am fairly new to the Apple world. Overall, I guess this is more of a glitch ompare to how Apple computers work in general. Ove it

Thanks for your response.

D'oh. Correction: "puffer" --> "puffery".

Welcome to the Mac.

In general, I've found that the best approach to new features in the Mac is to assume they will work right and proceed intuitively. Overthinking doesn't help.

For example, a long time ago, I was totally freaked out by a change Apple made in associating document files with Mac applications: This will never work! I relaxed, went with it, and --after a very few start-up difficulties-- I haven't seen any problems at all since.

Does this mean everything is always perfect? Absolutely not. Problems do occur. As a software professional, I know that bugs and design missteps are inevitable. I think the Mac developers do very well at minimizing problems.

@LPCGUY you are 100% right. Mission control is probably the worst idea ive seen in an apple OS. They ruined spaces to make it feel like a freaking ipad. Actually it should have gone the other way and spaces put on the ipad. I use Mulitflow for ipad which recreates spaces on there. Much better even on an iOS device. Apple get it together!!

Just a comment/suggestion: One sees the app's icon below it (nice feature, especially with those of us with less than perfect vision). However, this feature only works/is active if the app(s) is open in full-screen mode. It would make a lot more sense if the feature worked 100% of the time, instead of using numbers. With several apps open it is very difficult to distinguish between apps if, for instance, you have a .pdf open in the window right next to a Word doc. Just a thought.

Apple SW Team,

Please help improve this feature. You can't put all windows on one desktop. Mission Control is a good feature, but we won't know which desktop contains what apps/tasks without having a label on it.

I finally found a 3rd-party app that has almost all the features that I wanted, including the possibility to rename the mission control's desktop to whatever the user want.

The name is totalspaces2 and works with mavericks. I'll put a link even if I don't know if I'm allowed to: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com