Sonntag, 2. November 2003
Application Exposé
[comment on
www.macosxhints.com]
I actually filed this behavior as bug. I absolutely hate Apple's position on how to respect my ordering of the windows. They simply don't care. Instead of making the Finder "user-centric" they should make the UI "window-centric". It's annoying enough that you cant put input focus into a window that is not on top in the window stack, but to order all of the Applications' windows in front whenever they think it's appropriate is just horrible.
I was really looking forward that to the solutions that exposé has for navigation. I consider myself as a power user, and therefore I often work with many many windows per App. And often there are 2 Apps involved in my workflow and even more often only 2 or so of their windows are in my current work focus. Neither exposé nor application wide exposé offers a solution here. Although Application exposé without this ordering behaviour would have been the solution (Workflow: Applications exposé, tab, click on window). The only way of switching between these 2 Apps is to click on one each others window. Command-tab brings every window of the other app in front, obscuring the windows I worked. Another task that I often perform is bringing only one specific window of my current up in front. Here Application exposé would have been perfect. But sadly every single window of my app is brought in front, obscuring all my nice other applications that are part of my current workflow. Sadly this way quite useless, and I have to stick with the windows menu of my current app, and search my windows via window-title-text instead of doing it visually.
I want to work with my Mac and use many applications at once. Switching between them definitely shouldn't be as hard and annoying as it is now.
After this rant I feel obliged to say, that Mac OS X and it's UI are still far superior to the mainstream-alternatives. Windows and Linux are doing a by far lousier job in delivering a consistent and useful UI. In fact the only OS that really allows working with many applications without standing in your way is still
Risc OS, but it sadly hasn't put up with the pace of current OSes and has many shortcomings in other areas nowadays.
16:03 - Sonntag, 2. November 2003
I'm not sure I have the same problem. When I use Exposé, only the window I click on comes to the front—not all the windows of the application. Isn't that what you're after?
I agree that cmd-tab brings all windows to the front, but Exposé gives me only the window I click on.
Your kind of have the opposite wish. But what I'm ranting about is the "Application Window" option of exposé, because normal Exposé is not very useful with the amount of windows I usually have.
Ahh... okay. I understand now :P
Apologies for the (semi) duplicate post—I thought my first post didn't work (curse Safari's cache!).
Cheers.
Keep in mid that Alt-Tab Apps are ordered in LIFO order, such that the last used Apps are ordered from left to right. Alt-Tab once will always take you to the last used App, twice the second last used App, etc. If you have 5 Apps opened and the last two you were working in were Safari and Photoshop, if you Alt-Tab once you are taken to PS, When you are ready to go back to Safari, Alt-Tab once again. If you want to go back two Apps, keep the Alt key pressed and hit Tab twice. You never have to leave the keyboard.
Doesn't that give you what you want?
I know and appreciate this behaviour which is introduced in Panther and essentially following the behaviour windows showed for ages. But again, the problem is that on this action all the application's windows are put in front. And the problem is that I often work in 2 or 3 contextsts with 2 or more applications. As a result many windows get in front which I don't need at the moment.