| Saturday, October 25, 2003 |
20:20 - Relatively painless
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Twenty-five minutes to upgrade the G5 to Panther.
Twenty-five minutes. (Ten minutes on the first disc, fifteen on the second. I saved some time by leaving out the French localization. Nah, just kidding.) Compared to nearly three hours on the G3 iBook.
I think I'll like this machine.
...Once my bloody monitor gets back from service, that is. Grr. Anyway.
People all over the place are saying things like "I really had no idea what Exposé would be like-- it's almost impossible to describe on paper. You have to see it to understand-- it is damn cool." And yes, yes it is. I think it's one of the best solutions anyone's yet come up with for the age-old problem of grabbing the window you want out of a stack twenty Z-levels deep.
The first-order solution, after we graduated from the one-app-at-a-time modality of DOS and the first few Mac OS versions, was to minimize the window-- to an icon in Windows 3.1, or to the Taskbar in Win95. The Mac's solution ('round about 1994) was WindowShade, where you double-click on the title bar of the window and the window "rolls up" so all you see is the title bar. This had the advantage over Windows that you could "hide" a window and see what was behind it without having to move your mouse; the Windows minimize meant you had to go diving down to the bottom of the screen to get your window back. But WindowShade also meant lots of little horizontal title bars floating around and cluttering up the screen.
In Mac OS X, we've traditionally had two options: Hide the application (or Hide Others, to hide everything but the current app), or minimize to the Dock, á la Windows. Meanwhile, Win98 and later had the "Show/Hide Desktop" button, which let you instantly minimize and restore everything-- but then if you started to restore windows one-by-one, the state of the function got all non-deterministic. An improvement, but hardly ideal; and it didn't really help you focus on individual apps.
Alt+Tab/Command+Tab helped a bit-- you could zap from one application to another, if you knew the icon you wanted. In Windows this could be annoying in that many of your icons would look the same in the little pop-up dialog, and even if they weren't it was a very abstract concept. You had to remember your filename, which was no easy feat if you had, say, six Excel spreadsheets open in an MDI window, each with a cryptic filename that someone else in the company came up with. Mac OS X hopped from open app to open app in the Dock, which wasn't much prettier.
Until today, to grab the window you want, you've had to either a) move your mouse a lot, b) hide apps until you see the one you need, or c) work by filenames and tiny icons. None of them were very ideal or natural.
Well, now the problem is solved, and in a visual way-- the way that the human mind likes to work. Hit a key, and all your windows zoom to a neatly tiled layout all over your screen. Click the one you want, and it zooms to the front. You can also tile the windows within the current app only, or scoot all the windows off the screen at once. Want to put a file into your Mail message? Just hit F11 to sweep the screen clear, click and drag the file from the Desktop, hit F11 again to summon all your windows back, and drop the file onto the Mail window.
You can assign Hot Corners to these three behaviors (triggering them by moving the mouse pointer into selected screen corners), or even assign them to mouse clicks. I now have "All Windows" set to tile when I click the middle mouse button, and the screen to clear when I Option+click.
And naturally it's all just a Quartz layering effect, so all the windows are still displaying live while they're scaled-down and tiled. And naturally the G5 just purrs while doing this, whereas the G3 iBook kinda trips and coughs.
I love it when a feature like this comes out: yes, it's resource-hungry and makes for great show-off material. But it's also useful, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as much so if it didn't have all the Quartzy goodness. Seeing where all these windows come from and return to, in smooth real-time, is a functional requirement, not just a gee-whiz graphic effect. It's also important, from a comfort and gestural standpoint, for the feature to be impeccably polished, with every pixel and every shaded screen region carefully engineered. I saw Exposé evolve from its early form in the first betas; it looked nice then, but it's so sweet now. Form and function interweaving, inextricably. That's what it's all about.
Anyway-- the iBook had some problems; after installation completed, the Finder kept crashing and restarting, crashing and restarting, writing out kernel-access error dumps into the system logs every time. (Seems it's trying unsuccessfully to open a menu bar.) I couldn't figure out what was causing it, but a newly created user worked fine, so I just moved all my files over to a new account and everything seems happy now. It shouldn't have happened, but this is a fairly old, grandfathered configuration. It was getting messy anyway. This gives me a chance to rearrange some folders that I've been meaning to clean up since... oh, about July 2001.
Ahhh. Now to relax with a movie. I understand DVD Player 4 is integrated into Panther; I wonder what's different. ...I guess I'll find out.
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Brian Tiemann
