As a software developer I appreciate having good hardware. In fact, I appreciate having lots of good hardware as that best facilitates getting work done in a day.

Over my career I have evolved what I prefer to have for optimal work. I like to have a laptop on which I do “communication” work. So the laptop does email, web browsing, instant messaging, and whatever other administrata or time wasting I wish to do. Having it on a laptop is good because often such tasks require portability. I do set up the machine to also do development work, but it is not meant to be a primary dev machine.

I then like to have a very beefy machine for dev work. For instance, these days something like an 8-core Mac Pro with 10 GB of RAM and multiple internal hard drives works very nice. I also like to have multiple monitors attached to the machine because lots of screen real estate is good. Furthermore, it works better to have multiple monitors instead of one big monitor because there is often different logic that can be done based upon “screen 1” or “screen 2”, especially when doing things like debugging and needing to cope with the menubar and screen redraws.

Finally, I like having extra machines for whatever needs. These are often sandbox machines of various configurations that I can nuke and pave and do what I need to to help test, reproduce bugs, and so on.

So as you can see, I’ve found surrounding myself with a lot of machines is a daily necessity for getting my job done.

What happens when I’m forced to use a little machine for everything?

I’ve been temporarily reassigned to another group in the company that needs some help with their projects. Due to the nature of the products and the fact I like to keep very clean machines (sorry Unsanity; no Input Manager hacks here), plus given the nature of the work may require working in other locations, I requested they provide me with a laptop for dedicated use for this work.

I received one. A recent MacBook Pro.

15″.

Man, that’s small. Well, to me at least. 🙂

Compounding that is Apple changed some things in Snow Leopard to make stuff bigger. For instance, the default font in Xcode is Menlo Regular 11, instead of old Monaco 9 or 10.  I played with it some trying to pick other fonts or make things smaller, but I have to say, after I got over the initial shock my eyes do like the Menlo 11 better. But with bigger font means less content on the already smaller scren.

Then when I need to run Xcode for dev work, TextWrangler for notes and other things, Firefox to get into the bug database, and a few other apps… gah. Too many windows on that little screen. Sure I love Exposé and use it all the time, but it’s still a lot for that little screen.

So I started to use Spaces.

I toyed with Spaces before, but I just haven’t had a compelling need for it. I think it’s neat. I’m glad Mac OS X has it. But I haven’t been able to successfully put it into my workflow…. until today.

Turned it on, 4 spaces. Xcode on the main, TextWrangler “below”, Firefox “to the right” and since I prefer to use the keyboard I know the shortcuts to navigate around. Man… everything worked pretty slick. A few things were annoying, such as being on the non-Xcode space and then Xcode’s build window popping open on that space; it makes sense in a way, but it’s not what I want… I want to keep that app’s windows on that space. I wonder if there’s a way to force that.

I don’t know if I’d need to use Spaces on my big dev machine with the 2 monitors and lots of screen space. But on the little machine yeah, what a help it was.