Workspaces

What workspaces are for

A workspace is a single launcher item that contains several things. When you activate a workspace, every item in it opens. Use workspaces when you regularly need to open the same group of things together: your morning routine, an audio editing session, a research setup.

For example, an "Audio Session" workspace might contain:

• The Audacity application
• Your audio working folder
• A reference website

Turn the dial to it, press to activate, and all three open. You go from cold to ready in one action.

Creating a workspace

1. In the settings panel, press Enter on the category you want the workspace to live in, which shows that category's items
2. Click Add item
3. Change Item type, the first control in the dialog, to Workspace
4. Give the workspace a friendly name, for example "Workspace 1: Audio Session"
5. The dialog now shows a list at the bottom for the workspace's items
6. Click Add item to add each thing the workspace should open
7. When you're done, click OK

What workspaces can contain

Workspaces can contain websites, folders, files, applications, and radio stations. They cannot contain other workspaces. If you want a larger group, just put all the items into one bigger workspace instead.

Focus after launch

When editing a workspace you can choose what happens to keyboard focus after all the items have opened:

• No focus change: focus stays wherever it was (default)
• Focus first item launched: attempts to bring the first item's window to the front
• Focus last item launched: attempts to bring the last item's window to the front

Note: focus-grabbing is best-effort. It works for websites, files and applications. Folders are skipped, because a folder window belongs to the same program that owns your desktop and taskbar, and picking the wrong one would leave you somewhere confusing. The "no focus change" option is always reliable.

How items open

Items inside a workspace open one at a time, with a short pause between each. This prevents overwhelming the system when launching several things at once. The pause is small enough to feel instant.

If any item fails to open, the rest still launch and you'll hear which ones failed.

Checking what is inside before you open it

Press a workspace twice quickly and Dial reads out what it holds instead of opening it: the name, how many items, then each item in order. Useful when you have several similar workspaces and want to be sure this is the right one, and it saves going to the settings dialog to look.

Because of that second meaning, a press on a workspace is held back for a third of a second to see whether another one is coming. You hear a short tick the moment you press, so you know it registered. Nothing opens until the wait is over, and a workspace takes a moment to open anyway.

Items inside workspaces are independent copies

If your workspace contains "Gmail" and you also have a standalone "Gmail" item elsewhere, those are two separate items. Editing one doesn't affect the other. This is deliberate, changes to a workspace don't accidentally reach items you didn't intend to change.