For those of you who have 30″ Cinema displays, hooray for you. For those of us toting Macbooks or Macbook Pros, we know all too well how valuable that 13″-17″ display space is. Without buying an external monitor, or engaging in a frenzied maximize/minimize battle, how do you keep all of your documents, programs, and windows neat and organized?

Two words (but one program): Virtue Desktops. Virtue Desktops is an amazing application, free of charge, that simulates multiple desktops that users can quickly and fluidly navigate between to keep windows and applications organized.

To give you an example, how would you like to have 3 13″ Macbook screens instead of one? I like to use one screen for iChat and iTunes, one for iCal and Camino, and one for Pages and iPhoto.

Virtue Desktops resides on your system tray, and has quite a few pretty options for transitioning between your desktops. I assigned my transition keys to “command+right” and “command+left”, which switches between my desktops to the left and right, respectfully.

What does transitioning look like? Anything you want, just about. Virtue Desktops includes many animations (my favorite being Cube, the Apple animation that rotates your desktop on a cube to the left or right. It is quite impressive visually, and it blows Vista users away, which is also fun to play with), including Cube, Slide, Reveal, Fade, Warp, and many more.

You can customize your transition speed, making a slow or fast transition. One unique feature is motion-sensor-based switching, in which simply shifting your Macbook will rotate your desktop. Pretty fancy, and again, let’s see Vista do that.

Virtue Desktops is surprisingly system resource light; currently it is using 12 mb of my real memory. Not too bad.

As I said in my first “Maximize your Mac” entry, you could avoid prying eyes in classrooms or work by pulling the ole’ minimize, or perhaps the Exposé hide, but personally I prefer to rapidly rotate to the desktop you’re supposed to be working on, switching from Camino, iTunes, and iChat over to Pages or Keynote. Eh? Pretty slick.

If you’re a Parallels user, you may have been frustrated from time to time by attempting to run Windows full screen, and having to transition between maximized and window views. With Virtue Desktops, you can simply run Windows full screen on one desktop, and have a couple others assigned to OS-X, with all those flashy transitions in between.

In closing, Virtue Desktops will really add a lot to your organization and timeliness, it doesn’t demand much in the way of system resources, and best of all, it’s completely free! Go try it out, and be sure to send me your own ways to “Maximize your Mac.”