Weblog Entry
Over-Exposéd
March 23, 2004
Those aren’t Post-Its. That’s Simon Willison’s Exposé setup. God bless OS X.
mezzoblue
ISSN #1708-0789
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22 replies to this entry. (Comments are now closed.)
As a mac user who is totally addicted to tabs, I can still say that Exposé is a God-send. It may not help you see all the pages in your browser window, but funny, seems like I tend to use more than just browsers when working…
A photoshop, bbedit documents, terminal windows, browser windows (yes, more than one browser window with a dozen tabs loaded in each), mail, ichat, itunes, stickies, ical, net news wire.
A minor note that those who dont use exposé on a regular basis might not know: Exposé doesn’t just show thumbnail images of the windows you have open, but it gives you a live preview of what’s going on in each of the windows - you can watch pages loading, see incoming IMs, etc.
Haha, thanks john! You just destroyed any hope of me getting work done tonight.
And I can see this for a lot more than just browser windows. Think graphics programs, text files with various editors, email windows, and anything I just *want* open at the time.
This is going to help me so much! Thanks! :)
I think one problem with doing Exposé on Windows is that Mac OS X uses its system-level Quartz graphics rendering to get Exposé working *fast*. If you had something similar that worked too slowly, it would lose much of its utility. But if you could run it on a hefty WinBox with a good graphics card, it might work.
I set my PC desktop fonts to 72x72 pixels just so I could pretend!
Sorry, completely off topic here,
Dave, regarding your “I broke Google” daily…that’s how I found the Zen Garden, over three months ago!
what ever happened to tabbed browsing? i love that feature though, and even more so, i love the one to show the desktop.
hmm.. if his pb can do that, i wonder what mine can do (1.25ghz, but less ram). i’m constantly impressed by this machine
And what is that, exactly? I can recognize some of those designs, but what’s it all about?
Never mind:
http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Expos%C3%A9
A lowly windows user, I am…
There is a point at which Alt+Tab does become useless… My bet is Microsoft takes the idea and adds it to longhorn. But your right about one thing, it does look like Post-Its
Microsoft have something similar in the form of a ALT+TAB powertoy that shows a preview of the window your “ALT-TABBING” to.
ack – this drives me nvts! when in the world will we have OSX ported for intel boxes? ;)
at first, i thought that was a giant wall in a conf room full of html mock-ups. instead, it’s just craziness!
j.
Simon takes multitasking to a whole new level.
Is that a 17” PowerBook?
My 12” iBook would slow to a crawl with that many apps running, but I still love it.
I like cutesy Post-It-like windows on my screen.
I wish I could get used to Exposé more often, but with 90% of my time spent on a Dell and a measly 10% at my home’s Mac, the Alt-Tab approach always wins over. Pity me.
Now, that many windows leave me thinking whether Simon has an overclocked processor on his Powerbook or something.
That’s the first time I’ve seen Exposé and I must say I’m very impressed. If I had the capital I would purchace a Mac of some sort for that feature alone. Wow. The demo - http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/ - is amazing.
But out of curiosity, what is stopping somebody from making a windows app to handle this? The scaling+tiling (F9) trick might be a challenge, but the rest should be easy for anyone familiar with Windows programming.
My NEW life plan: finish college, get a good job, buy a Mac. :)
I had thought the same as jon above in msg #5 - it looks like some sort of presentation or something.
http://www.winplosion.com/ could help
<acronym title=”Apple OS X”>OS X</acronym> ? interesting…
Ha! WinPLOSION used to be called WinExposé! Hehehe. Guess Apple got to them :)
There’s a decent free app for this called iEx:
http://www.aqua-soft.org/board/index.php?showforum=45
These guys made a wrapper program for the config:
http://www.oxygen-inc.com/premium/InsaniSoft/iEx.htm
Apparently, the developer is working on version 0.3 which will have all the pretty animation and other features of Exposé.
It’s a 15” PowerBook with 768MB of RAM and a 1 GHz processor. I don’t normally run it with quite that many things open as it does slow down a bit, but at SxSW I was opening a new browser window every time a URL came up in a panel or conversation. It took about half an hour to clean everything up when I got back :)
I’m mostly a Windows user, having a humble G4 desktop at the house as my only mac. And normally when I’m on windows, I typically have one or two browser windows open (Firefox, of course) with at least 25 tabs. And then there are the requisite SSH sessions – typically about 4 or 5 at a time. If I wanted to make a crazy exposé screenshot like this, I’d have to seriously change the way I do things. I’d have to completely stop using tabs in my browser. To me, that’s just clutter. But it sure does look nice in that picture.
Simon–I said it then, and I’ll say it again: that’s an argument for Tabbrowser Extensions[1] if ever I saw one. ;)
[1] http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en