“Beryl” comes to Vista

I have to admit, one of the most attractive (to me at least) features of the Linux desktop has always been the famous Beryl/Compiz 3D “cube” plug-in. I first dismissed the feature as pure “eye candy,” however, after several months experimenting with various Linux distros, I came to appreciate the simple beauty and practicality of a 3-dimensional workspace. The ability to assign windows to different “surfaces” – and then navigate between them intuitively – made me more productive by allowing me to “un-clutter” my desktop.

So you can imagine my delight in discovering that I can create roughly the same experience under Windows, using a simple 3rd party utility called CubeDesktop:

Figure 1 – The 3D “Cube” View

With CubeDesktop, I can create up to six virtual desktops and navigate between them using mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts. The desktops can be wrapped around the aforementioned cube, around a “cylinder” like structure, flipped through via an OSX-like “cover flow” type view or spread out across a lighting table style “explorer” view. Each view is hardware-accelerated, providing for a clean, responsive navigational experience.

Figure 2 – The 3D “Roll” View

The “basic” version (9.95 Euros = ~$16 USD) supports only the 3D Cube look, while the “pro” version (19.95 Euros – ~$32 USD) adds the Roll, Flip, Carousel and Explorer looks as well as the Windows “Exposer” – a Mac OS X “expose” like tool for navigating between multiple applications within a single desktop.

Figure 3 – The Window “Exposer” View

Other useful “pro” features include the ability to password-protect individual desktops and to create rules defining specific desktops for specific applications.

Figure 4 – The 3D “Flip” View

I installed CubeDesktop under Windows “Workstation” 2008 x64. Aside from a few usability quirks (e.g. notification area icons in one virtual desktop not retaining their links to the corresponding application window in another desktop), the solution seemed stable. One feature – an icon management panel for controlling which desktops get which icons – was non-functional under 64-bit versions. But otherwise, CubeDesktop worked as advertised – and with a level of stability and “polish” I found lacking in competing solutions from Otaku and others.

Of course, the big question is whether or not it’s worth shelling out $30+ USD just to gain some fancy virtual desktop effects.

If you’re a long-term “Beryl” cube addict like me it’s a “no-brainer:” I’m way more productive with multiple desktops, and I find non-3D solutions counterintuitive. However, if you can do without the effects (which mostly add intuitiveness at the cost of higher resource consumption and lower overall functionality), you can achieve the same general productivity result using any number of freeware 2D virtual desktop solutions (Dexpot is a particularly attractive option, as is the open-source VirtuaWin). And you can reproduce a very “expose-like” effect using the Instant Viewer application in Microsoft’s free (for Microsoft Mouse owners) IntelliPoint software.

But don’t be mistaken: None of these comes close to the pure “cool” factor of spinning that cube…while still under Windows!