Expose -> Dashboard -> Virtual Desktops?

Read­ing some stuff about Dash­board today, it occured to me what Apple’s next step will be.

Exposé, the tech­nol­ogy that lets you zip apps off screen, or spread them out to see all win­dows, is very cool. Dash­board intro­duces a layer of (essen­tially) desk acces­sories that nor­mally resides off-screen, but zips on-screen at the touch of a button.

The next log­i­cal step is to, at the touch of a but­ton, zip reg­u­lar appli­ca­tions on and off-screen, cre­at­ing vir­tual desk­tops, really. So you’re work­ing on your woe­fully piti­ful sin­gle 23″ LCD mon­i­tor, and you have Pho­to­shop tak­ing up all avail­able screen real estate. Sud­denly, on the left side of your screen, a lit­tle Mail.app icon starts to bounce. You care­lessly hit F1 (for Screen 1, or you could hit Command-Left Arrow to nav­i­gate vir­tu­ally geo­met­ri­cally… or some­thing) and zip, your screen off to the left slides over, show­ing Mail and iCal or some­thing. You’ve got mail! And vir­tual desktops.

Of course, this would mostly be use­ful for your XServe admins to zip from one machine to the next, or for (mytho-poetical) iPalm users to eke out more real estate from their 200 x 400 pixel screens. Of course, you’d have to replace the F-Key with a sty­lus ges­ture, or maybe that Air-Force mind con­trol link.

Cool.

See: Dash­board II by Dave Hyatt
and: Dash­board vs. Kon­fab­u­la­tor by John Gru­ber
and: Mon­keys Con­trol Robotic Arm with Brain Implants