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Exposé / Spaces in Mountain Lion
- Thread starter farmermac
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I see you know my wife.
Mine minimizes every window til she finds the one she wants. If she doesn't find it, she somehow scours through 20 or more tiny icons on her Dock.
Consider Spaces:
and Mission Control:
View attachment 325407
In the first screenshot, I can see ALL open windows, in all spaces, at once, in the largest possible size they can fit. Pressing Space over each one will make that one even bigger.
In the second screenshot, try to quickly tell which is the current desktop (tip: it's the one with the white border around the thumbnail). Moreover, try to quickly preview other windows, on other desktops. You can't. You have to swipe to those desktops one by one, linearly. THEN you really lose track of which desktop you're on now.
Another issue is this: no, I don't instinctively know what app the window I'm looking for is in. Sometimes I have a PDF open in Safari, and another PDF in Preview. All I know is that I want to get to a certain PDF, I don't remember which was the one in Preview and which was in Safari. What if I have 4 Pages documents open on 4 different desktops, clicking "Pages" in the dock will only show me one of the documents. If I want to use App Exposé, I need to first click Pages in the dock, which will yank me to another desktop, and THEN activate App Exposé, and then choose the window I want, which will probably also yank me to yet another desktop.
The only thing I like about Mission Control are the gestures. But why couldn't Apple just implement gestures to control Spaces? 3-finger swipe up/down/left/right to navigate between spaces, 4-fingers-up to enter Spaces Overview Mode (like top screenshot), and 4-fingers down to enter Exposé without entering Spaces. Why not?
I think that in Mission Control, it's extremely confusing that the top thumbnails are a different size than the large "current desktop" in the middle, which, in case you're in a full screen app, isn't even your current desktop, but rather Desktop 1 for some baffling reason.
Basically, in Mission Control, there is absolutely no way to see all your open windows at once if you have more than one desktop, while in Snow Leopard there is. To me, that makes Snow Leopard's window management better, no matter what.
This has forced me to limit myself to two spaces at the most. So I don't have to search for a window. Really, what kind of crazy man would murder Spaces?
For the record even though I dislike a lot of things in Lion/ML MC is far down the list and I do appreciate some of the benefits over Expose/Spaces (although I would prefer the SL way)
But seriously?! People who use more than one app to open the same content don't do it for fun. We use more than one app because different apps do different things...
Ex: I will open up a pdf file in preview if I want to highlight it. I will open it up in adobe reader if I need to fill out a form that isn't supported by preview or if I want to check cross platform compatibility...I will open a jpeg in photoshop if I want to edit it but I will open the same jpeg in preview if all I want to do is view/rotate it. This seems extremely reasonable/essential depending on your work flow so I don't understand why you think people would be making their lives more complicated just because they can...(I hope I don't sound rude)
Windows management in OSX has always been less than stellar (yes expose has its downsides too). I am disappointed that with MC Apple chose to make things worse rather than really sitting down and trying to make things better. It is hard to manage multiple windows for the same application in OSX (this is not Lion specific). Sometimes that is exactly what people need to do to get work done. I would love to see Apple attempt to address this without all the overly cutesy graphical clutter that they seem to trend towards these days...
The way that Expose and Spaces worked (also together) in Snow Leopard wasn't bad, only issue was the limitation to a mere 4 x 4 = 16 Spaces, but at least there was a grid...
how does making mission control favour app-centric searches become a productivity gain? if you want to find an app, you've always had the dock AND command+tab at your disposal. and if you're properly gonna be OCD about that kind of organization, i'd think those clean lists of app icons would be preferable to the additional visual clutter of multiple piles of document windows (ew documents, who'd want to search for those?). you are saying people should search for app first, document second, but apps in mission control are most strongly visually defined by a single document at the top of each collected pile.
if i may make a modest proposal, maybe we should just take things a step further and completely do away with multiple documents open at once. work on one, close it and then open the next. nice and clean. actually lets get rid of multiple windows of any kind for that matter. full screen apps do seem to be the future. come to think of it, even multitasking is just another word for mental unfocus. i guess even iOS has gone too far in that regard... hopefully they'll give us another productivity boost and scrap multitasking from iOS6
ps. yes i know my snark meter is off the charts here, but i just feel like i'm living in bizarro land when taking a really useful feature for finding an open document and reducing it to essentially a listing of running apps (which as i pointed out, already existed in no less than 2 other forms) is considered the best productivity enhancer of recent times.
Well, actually if Apple did this, all the MS fanboys would be complaining that Apple copied Windows 8how does making mission control favour app-centric searches become a productivity gain? if you want to find an app, you've always had the dock AND command+tab at your disposal. and if you're properly gonna be OCD about that kind of organization, i'd think those clean lists of app icons would be preferable to the additional visual clutter of multiple piles of document windows (ew documents, who'd want to search for those?). you are saying people should search for app first, document second, but apps in mission control are most strongly visually defined by a single document at the top of each collected pile.
if i may make a modest proposal, maybe we should just take things a step further and completely do away with multiple documents open at once. work on one, close it and then open the next. nice and clean. actually lets get rid of multiple windows of any kind for that matter. full screen apps do seem to be the future. come to think of it, even multitasking is just another word for mental unfocus. i guess even iOS has gone too far in that regard... hopefully they'll give us another productivity boost and scrap multitasking from iOS6
ps. yes i know my snark meter is off the charts here, but i just feel like i'm living in bizarro land when taking a really useful feature for finding an open document and reducing it to essentially a listing of running apps (which as i pointed out, already existed in no less than 2 other forms) is considered the best productivity enhancer of recent times.
And just go to any windows forums to see how much they like that
FiNALLY
Guys, just found this: http://switchstep.com/ReSpaceApp
Havent tried it, because I Love me SL...but it would be cool if you could test it, and tell if it brings the space-experience back !
Thanx
Guys, just found this: http://switchstep.com/ReSpaceApp
Havent tried it, because I Love me SL...but it would be cool if you could test it, and tell if it brings the space-experience back !
Thanx
I know I've sen someone mention this app before.
Try searching the forum and you should be able to find more info on it.
I'm still with SL also. So I don't know how well it works. The impressions I got was that it's not perfect, but it might work for some.
The developer comments in the forums show that he is making progress toward that functionality. I'm pretty sure he is aiming at a good 10.5/10.6 style Expose/Spaces clone.
Excellent! One step closer! I hate Lion as it is right now. The opening windows where they closed thing is good and all and there are loads of things that are nicer but usability has seriously decreased. It feels like Vista vs XP to me and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
All windows exposé was what made me switch to mac in the first place. It was when I saw how you could switch between open windows in Tiger that I became hooked. Not only that but it's the biggest selling point I've used to switch my friends - many, many of them. They all now, like I, strongly dislike Lion due to the bastardisation of Exposé. Those of them that used to use Spaces hate Lion even more.
Doing actual work on Lion has become a real chore compared to Snow Leopard. I usually have at least ten safari windows, about ten textedit windows, several TextWrangler coding windows, Matlab, 4-10 terminal windows, MSN, Skype, Twitter and Mail open. It used to be easy to find the particular Safari window I wanted or the textedit note that I wanted. Now it takes an awful amount of clicking to do what was a one click operation (move to hot corner to expose, then click on what I want). What's even better is it was just as effective on my 30" ACD as it is on my 15" MBP.
If anything, features such as the restart-windows-on-reboot just exacerbates the problem as I often have several unneeded windows open from my previous shutdown so there's even more clutter.
I can't understand why Apple would destroy Spaces and Expose like this. All they had to do was leave an option for 'classic Expose and Spaces' and we would have been happy. It's not like they would have had to recode anything, just copy and paste the Snow Leopard code.
As it stands, Mac OS X is not fit for purpose for production purposes for a good number of people. It could be fixed with the addition of a simple check box.
I 100% agree. This is the #1 reason I'm still with SL, and will be in the future.
Looks promising, though. Anyway I have no success to get it running on Mountain Lion DP2
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Many of us still keeping SL as their main OS, and I believe they will for a long time, because of Expose, and I would stay even longer if they would add iCloud support for SL. PhotoStream would be great though.
Seriously I have to strongly agree. People's argument that client's mission control feature is equivalent to the exposed a/spaces feature in Snow Leopard is lacking experience or understanding of what this really does.
I am also forced to use Snow Leopard without upgrading because I would be looking at a major setback and productivity. I love the ability to hold Adobe Photoshop file on the left of my screen and automatically extract over to the illustrator program I have opened an adjacent cell or grid.
As far as stacking up white windows on top of one another, that's just annoying. If I had three Microsoft Word or iWork pages open up at the same time I want to see them all at same times I can remember which one I meant to go back and type something.
Sure on a laptop this white feature might come in handy, what's the point of owning a Mac Pro if you can't be a pro ? needless to say that I am disabled on one of my arms so swiping is just not going to be feasible.
Maybe if we get millions of people to complain to Apple about this problem will finally give us a choice between Mission control in the spaces feature that would be reasonable. Even if it eats up memory, Just by more lol
also you can re-arranger spaces while looking at the grid by holding cursor down and dragging the grid space were ever you would like. You can also grab individual windows while looking at this space in the grid view and also drag them to other spaces without moving the grid space.
Bottom line, mission control is a flop just like Vista. It should only be used by lightweight users.
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Looks promising, though. Anyway I have no success to get it running on Mountain Lion DP2
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Many of us still keeping SL as their main OS, and I believe they will for a long time, because of Expose, and I would stay even longer if they would add iCloud support for SL. PhotoStream would be great though.
I have tested out this feature on my Mac Pro laptop and it is something fun to play around with and somewhat practical for a laptop user. However it could not handle running for Adobe CS5 programs and alternate between them seamlessly. It is a good start I think but still has a very long ways to go. Perhaps a year.
It is also missing a lot of the features. It overlaps the grid on top of your existing window instead of zooming out and fading to a solid blue screen with a simple grid showing all open windows like in the Snow Leopard version. You also can't drag windows to other grids or rearranged grids themselves while looking at it. A lot of the functionality is very basic, which I do understand that is just the start like I said.
Personally, I think Lion is great and that MC is a great step up from Expose & Spaces. If you constantly have one space for a whole bunch of files, of course you are going to get confused, it's basically a desk with overlapping files..
Use full screen apps when possible, and limit each desktop to a couple of documents.
The only real way to make something work for you is to completely embrace it and work with what you have to make it functional. Whining about missing the past isn't going to get you anywhere. If you don't like the current setup, apple.com/feedback and hope that enough people feel the same way.
Use full screen apps when possible, and limit each desktop to a couple of documents.
The only real way to make something work for you is to completely embrace it and work with what you have to make it functional. Whining about missing the past isn't going to get you anywhere. If you don't like the current setup, apple.com/feedback and hope that enough people feel the same way.
Full screen apps are not a solution: there is no way to see the desktop, and any popup dialog and window easily gets lost behind the full screen app, never to be found ever again. Moreover, full screen apps appear on the rightmost side of all your desktops, which is completely confusing and illogical to me. This is why I don't use full screen, even though it would be a good idea if it worked.
I have one space per app, mostly, and I end up with lots of spaces. Swiping between 6 spaces is annoying, since it's all linear. In Snow Leopard, you could just go to any desktop in one or two steps, even when you had loads. Moreover, Spaces in Snow Leopard helped you to VISUALLY remember locations of desktops: you could remember things like "Safari is ABOVE Mail" or "Photoshop is to the LEFT of Bridge", etc Now that's pretty much gone.
I am whining about losing something, because I don't see WHY this is necessary. It's like someone suddenly deciding that you no longer have the internet. Sure, our parents lived fine without it. But once you've experienced it, you no longer want to live without it, especially if there is no logical REASON to live without it.
TotalSpaces is a few days from 1.0 release, beta testing 0.9.9 now between Lion and Mountain Lion. It is FANTASTIC! Works exactly as Spaces did prior to Lion. Some screen shots attached. I use dual displays, support for dual displays is coming in the 1.0 release as well as other features.
Attachments
You know that full screen apps, and desktops for that matter, can be rearranged right?
Yes, but only manually, i.e. since the assignment of apps to spaces is gone you are forced to manually rearrange every time you launch something, else you mind-map is off.
(And this is ignoring other productivity reducing facts like that I am now forced to a 1D mind-map where previously I could use a 2D arrangement of spaces.)
I am using it since a week, and it is awesome. The only gripe with the current version is full screen apps. But regarding spaces, they got it right. And they will definitely cover full screen apps in coming versions.