http://www.pascal.com/diary/?p=183
There has been a lot of discussion (see Henry Story, Dave Dribin & John Gruber) regarding Apple’s implementation of virtual desktop, Spaces, in OSX 10.5, and it’s target audience.
Pascal suggests that the user should be able to decide whether Command + Tab should allow the user to leave their current space or not (displaying only the icons for that space, theoretically giving the user four very different environments).
“Suppose you’re in space 3 and all your currently-open Safari windows are in space 1. If you switch to Safari, it would act as if there were no windows open and open a new one for you. So each space is truely like a new monitor, a new workspace, oblivious of its partners.”
I would add that the Command + Tab shortcut could be bettered by adding the Alt key, to provide traditional application switching, and to display the icon status (I work with the dock hidden, and rely on the application switcher to tell me if I have email or IM).
However, as much as I would love the additional functionality I believe that this may not make life any easier for the average user, who will seldom take the time to experiment with preference pane options - I can imagine that this sort of interaction is difficult to explain with one line of text next to a checkbox.
