Thursday, January 05, 2006

Finally I discover a use for Expose

Lord, but this set of Kelby tips is good. I'd never quite figured out the use of Expose, except for hitting F11 to show my desktop. What was the advantage over hitting Cmd-Tab and cycling between apps? Ahh, but what if an app has many windows ...
Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Switching Apps Within Expos�:

Once you have Expose invoked (you pressed either F9 or F10), you can toggle through your open applications and Finder windows by pressing the Tab key. Press the Tab key once and the next open application and its miniaturized windows come to the front. Press Tab again, it goes to the next open app. Want the previous app? Press Shift-Tab.
When I use Firefox I have multiple tabs in windows, but also multiple windows. The tab/window sorting problem is very annoying (only OmniWeb tried to fix that and I didn't like their vertical tabs, IE 7 is supposed to tackle it better) and this doesn't entirely fix that, but using Expose this way is indeed more efficient than using Cmd-Tab to find a desired window. F9 arranges all the windows, F10 leaves one in the background. I'm not sure which I prefer.

So now I'll be using Expose. Heavens, I might end up using Widgets -- if they put the darned things on the desktop where they belong.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, by far the coolest thing about Exposé is using it with active screen corners to be able to mouse into a corner, view the application windows and click on what you want to use. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of overusing the mouse and prefer to Cmd-Tab to other applications, but for switching windows within an application (as you note), Exposé is sweet. You can enable the different Exposé functions for the screen corners in the System Preferences under Dashboard and Exposé.

JGF said...

Thanks! Now that I've finally twigged the value of Expose for sorting through various application windows, I'll give the active corners a try with expose.

On my 12" iBook it was too easy to hit them accidentally, but I do use a corner on my iMac to trigger our screensaver slideshow.