I've been using a 3D desktop manager for a little while now. It's called CubeDesktop.

Today I got V1.3.2 and I feel I can finally write a little recommendation for this tool as, previously, I had a few issues that I think are going away ( if they've not gone completely ).

I do quite a lot of talks in front of large groups and sometimes I'm lucky and have more than 1 PC to talk from and a fancy switching box which moves between those PCs. This means I can have a demo machine or two and a slide machine and it's lovely.

More often though I have just the one machine. My laptop. HP NC 8430, 4GB RAM, 200GB 7200rpm disk, Core2 Duo T7400 processor and an ATI graphics card where the model number escapes me ( X1600? ).

I don't have any other laptop which is often quite risky for bigger conferences as if this one breaks I've had it - hopefully one day someone will get me another laptop :-)

When I'm working from one machine it's often quite nice to have a number of things set up on another desktop so that I can do something like run some slides on desktop 1 and then switch to Visual Studio on desktop 2. For most of the slots I do, I spend a lot of time in Visual Studio.

This is where CubeDesktop comes in. It's a really neat way of doing this and it works really well on Windows Vista. In fact, I kind of wish this was built in to Windows Vista ( like Spaces is on my Mac ) and maybe someone over in the Windows world could look to do such a thing in the future? There was a power toy for XP which did desktop management but it's not there for Vista and it wasn't quite as slick as this tool.

So, CubeDesktop lets me set up 6 desktops and they show up in my System Tray;

and then I can click on one of those desktops to move to it or I can do the more fancy cube-movement ( this is from my desktop as I'm writing this post);

or I can do the more fancy tiled movement;

or I can do the carousel movement;

or I can do the newly introduced Roll movement ( which they don't yet have a key combination for - come on guys! );

You need to see the thing in action in order to appreciate that it does all this with a degree of panache applying shadows and effects and transitions.

All in all - I really quite like this tool although it does have some glitches that have kept me on my toes at some conferences recently :-)

Give it a whirl ( I point out at this point that there's no link between me and the guys that make it, I just like it and have been asked a few times what it was so wanted to give it its fair recognition although it does still have a few bugs :-) ).