killall Dock

I’ve never really been sold on the 3D dock in Snow Leopard and gave it a good 3 or 4 month run… but in the end, ultimately decided to go back to the 2D style where I think the dock belongs.

~moses

Original post: http://www.loyalmoses.com/2009/08/snow-leopards-expose-bad/

Approaching 4 months later, and that post is still the number one most viewed blog entry on the site. Apparently, I am not the only one who is still a little disappointed with the new changes to Expose.

Even though I still find it frustrating to work with the new Expose, the other features of the OS are outweighing the inconveniences and I am “dealing” with it.

Back to work…

~moses

First, let me start this post by noting that should you know a little about me, you’re already aware that I am a huge fan of Apple and OS X since making the switch to Mac’s nearly 6 years ago. Now that it’s clear this isn’t an Apple / OS X bashing post, I can get on to the business of my issue with Expose in Snow Leopard.

What is Expose?

Expose is a feature of OS X which scales down all window displays to make them simultaneously visible for easy / simple / quick application or window switching.

How did Expose work in previous releases of OS X (10.5 and earlier)?

Expose scaled down windows, maintained their aspect ratio and made sensible x,y coordinate changes to ensure that all windows were visible at the same time and somewhat close to where they started (as best it could).

How is Snow Leopard’s Expose different?

Expose in Snow Leopard does away with maintaining aspect ratios and forces the display of strangely sized windows into an odd and awkward grid pattern.

My issues:

By tossing aspect ratios out the window (pun kind of intended), Expose creates IMHO silly and useless displays of unrecognizable windows. As an example, when several windows are open and Expose is activated a normally tiny iChat window dwarfs what was a full screen browser or mail.app window.

The reason Expose in previous versions of OS X was so successful, is that size was just one of the many visual queues that were used to quickly locate and switch between applications and windows. Now that Expose no longer maintains a size relationship for windows, this queue is gone and now a user is forced to visually hunt down a window by trying to recognize color patterns or worse, read each of the text displays under each window.

In addition to my complaint regarding window sizing and ratios, the new Expose forces windows into a grid pattern which again causes windows to be placed sometimes directly under your mouse or worse (and more often) at far reaches of your desktop. This may be fine on a 13″ MacBook, but this gets real old on 24″ or larger displays, when the two applications you are using are continuously thrown to opposite sides and corners of Expose.

Specifically for me, I can have a dozen windows or more open, of which half of them look similar when they are regularly sized. Throw this new Expose in the mix and its functionality is degraded to worthless as it takes immense concentrated effort to locate the window you want.

On any given serious day of Mac use, I may use Expose as many as a few thousand times. This is an enormous point of contention for me because Expose has become such a critical part of how I use OS X and my overall productivity level.

I will more than likely give Expose a few more days, and if it doesn’t grow on me (which I fear it won’t), then I welcome a clean install of Leopard on my primary development machine so I can get back to work without OS induced frustrations.

Snow Leopard has a significant number of very technical enhancements going on under the hood and several interface updates which for the most part are quite enjoyable, it’s just not enough to overpower my negative views of Expose. This particular machine didn’t really appear to benefit much from the performance gains in Snow Leopard as it was quick enough with 10.5 and was already running very well.

I will most definitely continue to recommend Snow Leopard to / for others, but for me it simply comes down to my particular personal feature usage patterns.

Last bit of whining:

…while I am crying about Expose, who approved that horrible blue glow around Expose windows? Seriously. It’s just bad.

“Change” I can believe in!

If you happen to feel the same way I do, or if you just feel bad enough for me to want some change, then drop Apple some feedback and let them know how you / I feel.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

~moses