( small rant about sloppy software (and business practices) )

I'm looking for virtual-desktop software for Windows XP with the following properties:

• Supports six or more desktops. Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager fails here, being limited to four.
• Can switch desktops with a single click on a grid (or something similar); I'm not interested in apps that run only on hotkeys or require cycling. VirtualWin fails here, requiring me to cycle through them by repeatedly clicking on something in the task bar.
• Doesn't get confused by multiple windows from the same app being on different desktops. (I usually keep a few Firefox windows around.) Cool Desk appears to fail here; it's making my second Firefox window sticky when I don't want it to. This will probably get some more testing, as the app is otherwise decent (once you swap out the default skin).
• Doesn't interact badly with some unknown OS update that landed in the last two months (sigh). JSPager, which I've been using happily for years, is now implicated in unplanned Windows restarts. ("Implicated" is the wrong word in that it's probably not really JSPager's fault, but my attempts to debug it have all failed, including the ones involving hardware.)
• Commonly-found features that I care about: can make windows sticky on demand; can send windows from one desktop to another easily; task bar for a desktop shows only that desktop's windows.
• Nothing that would obviously bar it from being approved by a corporate IT department (unverifiable executables from Russia or Iran, for instance).

Any suggestions? Thanks.

hobbitblue

Continuing the chain of strange technical foo, I just wrote a TIF file (native Windows thingy, apparently) so that I could email it to myself at work, where I can (with luck) distill it into PDF so I can in turn send it to the composer whose song I arranged in the first place, to see what he thinks of it. If he doesn't hate it, I'll give a copy to our cantorial soloist for consideration by the choir.

One of these days I should get myself some better tools. :-)

I'm currently arranging a (modern) piece of music for choir and piano. I'm finding there are two software features -- easy to implement I think -- that would make me particularly happy.

(Note: I'm just grousing about my software here. I'm unlikely to change to something else unless an import path better than MIDI exists for all my current music, but feel free to say positive things about other software anyway, if you like. I may switch someday, after all. But this isn't explicitly a call for alternative suggestions.)

First, chords. The composer of the melody line sent me a melody with chords, so the first thing I did after typsetting the melody (he sent me PDF rather than source, which was fine in this case) was to populate a temporary line with block chords so I could hear the melody in that context. (Hey, if the tools are available I will use eyes and ears to arrange, thank you very much. Besides, I am so not used to modern music...) It would be nice if I'd been able to just enter the chord names and have the software fill in the multi-note blocks for me.

The second is the accompaniment line. A lot of choral music provides a piano line that is the union of the voice parts, which the pianist plays during rehearsal. Reading open score is a pain in the butt, so you want to provide that music to the pianist in standard piano notation. I want my software to auto-generate it for me. (Though in this case I'm leaning toward having the piano do something other than mimic the singers, so this would be something only relevant for rehearsal. And maybe it's not critical there? I don't know; I personally find a piano playing all the lines while I sing in a choir to be a distraction, not an aid, but I may be a mutant.)

Oh well. Life isn't perfect. For most of the music I do, neither of these features would be all that relevant. But every now and then I bump into something new. It's all part of stretching, I guess. :-)

(I prefer McAfee anti-virus to Norton; it does a better job of telling me what it's doing and it doesn't demand to restart my machine after practically every update the way Norton did when I was using it. I have no opinion on the firewalls, other than a sneaking suspicion that it'll work best if from the same vendor.)

Apropos of nothing, I just made an appointment with my vet for "Erik plus one". She wants to see Erik in a few weeks and they're all due for checkups, but I they could only fit in two cats on the target night. So we'll see who I manage to catch that night. :-)