Workspaces

Rounding out the customization features, we have workspaces. Workspaces let you save any combination of palette locations, keyboard shortcuts, and custom menu sets for quick and easy recall. To save a workspace, set the palettes the way you want them, and optionally load any custom keyboard shortcut and menu sets, then choose Save Workspace from the Workspace submenu on the View menusee Figure 2-11.

Figure 2-11. Saving workspaces

Saved Workspaces appear at the foot of the Workspace submenu. For even easier recall, you can use Actions to assign function keys to different workspaces.

We used saved workspaces in many ways. When Bruce uses his laptop at home, it's always connected to a second monitor, and he uses the laptop screen for palettes, but when he's on the road, everything has to be shoehorned into the laptop's 1024 x 768 resolution, so he's created workspaces for each configuration. When he's writing Actions, Bruce likes to make the Actions palette as long as possible. The rest of the time he keeps it compact, or docks it in the palette well, so again, workspaces automate changing the palette.

Essentially, the use of the customization features is limited mostly by your ingenuity, but if you make too many customizations, it may become difficult to remember what each one does! So experiment, but use common senseit's easy to go hog-wild with this stuff.