(no subject)

[prog]

I wonder if anyone finds Exposé useful. When I hit F9, I end up with lots and lots of little white rectangles arranged in no particular pattern, and have to spend many seconds visually scanning, and then confirming with the rollover-labels, before finding the window I want. I always do better by the approproate icon's Dock menu.

One argument for it: you can select a particular window with the keyboard alone. But you still need to hunt around quite a bit. And anyway, if you have full keyboard access turned on (which seems to be the Panther-install default), you can do the same thing by focusing on the Dock (Control-D (actually I use Shift-command-D... yay for customizable bindings)), arrow-keying to the right icon, up-arrowing to the right window name, and voilá.

OK, I thought of something: if you are a graphic artist Exposé can be more useful than deciding from the Dock menu which "Untitled N" window is the one you want. But I work primarily with text, and hence all my windows, when shrunk down to shrinky-dink size, become the same sort of white rectangles with gray smudges. That's fine, then.

Comments

$.02

[kyroraz.livejournal.com]

Expose makes navigating any work in X Windows useful again. X is now non-painful to use under OS X.

somewhat

[oasys.livejournal.com]

I use the "hide windows" (F11 by default, but I use the magic corners feature) option regularly often to get to something on my desktop. I rarely use the "show all windows" option, probably because I try to have only a few windows per desktop (I use desktop manager) to keep things manageable.

Oh, and don't talk to me about the control-D default mapping. That really annoyed me when I first installed Panther. I couldn't figure out why xterm wasn't working correctly. Took a couple days of me getting progressively more annoyed before I hunted down what changed.

I do use expose to show off to people that haven't seen Panther yet. That, and the fast user switching animation are quite sexy.

Re: somewhat

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yes, I lived with the control-D nonsense for a couple of days before venting at daerr over AIM about it, and then realizing where the problem lay as soon as I did so.

It seems a strange choice for Apple, because control-D, beyond being a common keystroke for shell users, has been a built-in feature of the standard Cocoa text-editing interface since point-oh. Undocumented, but certainly no secret either. Shrug...

Something nice: If you don't have Quickdraw Turbo Express Hyper Edition (or whatever it's called; you can tell I've kinda slipped out of the Mac loop) then the user-switching doesn't bother with the cube-rotation animation; it just snaps from one to the other.

Re: somewhat

[prog.livejournal.com]

"Quartz Extreme", that's what it is. Today is not a good day.