Being that I only have a little 12″ iBook that can do 1024×768 and no more having virtual desktops is essential. This is something that even Microsoft give away for free with the Power Toys these days but not Apple, so you have to hunt around.
There are a number of options, 4 opernsource and maybe another 4 commercial that I found. Till today I used Desktop Manager, it is a opensource project and does what you want it to do it does however have some issues. Most annoyingly it interacts badly with Adium X, Adium developers claim that the Desktop Manager author has admitted to it being a bug in his software but has not yet fixed it. I was reluctant to move away from it since it has a nice global-hotkey run dialog that is very useful for launching apps without having to hunt around the ghastly Finder or Dock applications.
Today I switched to Virtue, it is nice and based on Desktop Manager but has some additional features and it integrates with the system alt-tab behavior to switch desktops to the one that the app you choose is on. It also supports more hotkeys for switching desktops and understands about keeping a specific program in all desktops.
What about hotkeys? Well I also invested the time in learning Quicksilver, there is no going back, it’s absolutely brilliant, but more on this later on.
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