On 17 Dec 2003 at 7:25, Phil Daley wrote: > At 12/16/2003 12:46 PM, Fiskum, Steve wrote: > > >> WinXP had user switching in its initial release, so it seems to me > >> that Exposé is copied from WinXP, though, quite obviously, with a > UI >> that is vastly superior to and more intuitive than MS's boring > >> implementtation (which most people don't understand and don't > use). >> >Here is some info on Expose. I think you may have a > different response after >reading. > > >http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/ > > Seems useless to me, but maybe the Mac doesn't have a row of buttons > for every program on the start bar.
And how useful are those buttons under these circumstances: 1. you have multiple instances of the same application with different documents. 2. since the taskbar displays the title bar text of the window it represents, if the app's title bar is of the format "Application Name - Document Name", when you have any number of apps running, you can't tell which document is represented by which window without scrubbing the mouse over them to trigger the tooltip that gives the full title bar text. 3. compare scenario 2) with 4 running taskbar buttons to running with 8 and then with 16 and then with 32. It's pretty clear that the taskbar becomes useless for identifying which window is represented by which taskbar button very, very quickly. Note that Microsoft has gotten smart on this -- the original Word UI guidelines specified the Application - Document format for title bars, but with Office 2000 and IE5 Microsoft change the rules for themselves for precisely this reason. Office 2K forced the issue because of MS's stupid insistence on moving to the single document interface (i.e., each Word document gets an independent window, rather than child windows of the parent Word window), and then in WinXP, MS had to come up with a solution to the proliferation of taskbar icons created by the stupidity of regressing to the single document interface, and they did this by putting an option in the Taskbar that would group all the windows for a single application instance in a single button, with a dropdown menu for navigating between them. The taskbar (and OS X's Dock) are not big enough to solve problem of identifying what the iconic items represent. Making them large enough would take over too much of the working area. Enter Expose, which easily toggles you between what amounts to a full-screen Dock (taskbar) and your applications. It's rather as though in Windows Alt- Tab used the whole screen to represent the apps that you can cycle through. The benefit seems quite obvious to me, as someone who has sworn at the taskbar, the taskbar's failed promise and the things MS has done to muck it up ever since it was introduced in Win95. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
