If you like the idea of virtual desktops using You Control: Desktops, but don’t want to sacrifice any of your real estate in the menu bar, this tip is for you.

I read a post in another forum where the user said they had a 12″ PowerBook and didn’t want to have to have You Control: Desktops take up any of their menu bar space. Reasonable enough request. Here’s how you can minimize the menu bar footprint of You Control: Desktops.

1. Launch You Control: Desktops. Go to the Menus tab.
2. In the Menu Text text entry box, highlight the default entry “Desktops” and press the space bar.
3. Click the “Set Hot Key…” button.
4. Enter a hot key combo that can be unique to You Control: Desktops. Setting a hot key here is a global function, so don’t use a hot key combo like Command-S.

What this does is places You Control: Desktops in the menu bar, but the name of the menu is a single space character (step 2) so it takes up very little room in your menu bar. So how do you access the menu that displays your virtual desktops? Just press the hot key combination you set in steps 3-4 above.

Many thanks to our friends over at the Diablo Valley Mac User Group for their recent published review of You Control 1.3.

Don Nelson sums it up best when he says,

“After using You Control for a while, it’s grown on me. Yes, you can get just about all of these little system enhancements somewhere else, sometimes even for free. You won’t be able to get them all at one place and they won’t work together as seamlessly as they do here. You’ll soon be wondering how you ever got along without them!”

Wow. What an exciting past week it’s been. Last week we announced You Control: Desktops, our virtual desktop manager utility that lets you create multiple virtual workspaces. The response from our user base has been nothing short of amazing and we are truely grateful.

If you’re not familiar with virtual desktops and what you might do with them, definitely check out our product page. I’ve included a few flash movies below so you can see You Control: Desktops in action.

There are a bunch of tips and tricks for this app so many of the posts you’ll see soon will relate to You Control: Desktops.