I love dashboard widgets! I access them by moving my cursor to the bottom left corner of my screen. Since I use my laptop for school, it would benefit me to have a third desktop layer besides the ones presented by the regular desktop and the widgets layer. Is there a way to have a third “desktop” that I can access the same way I access the widget layer?

As it happens, there are some terrific programs available that can solve the exactly problem you’re talking about, and they work by creating “virtual” desktops. With one of these programs installed on your computer, you can easily have two, three or even four or more different Mac desktop windows, with different content and application windows in each.

On my laptop, for example, I have four windows, labeled “Firefox”, “Safari”, “Entourage” and “Editing/Research”, with the applications you’d expect running in each.

The specific program I use is a freeware application called…