December 28th, 2008 by Manic
I have not been known to be very kind to Apple. The products they make are ok, but to me they usually felt kind of gimmicky and way too expensive and incompatible with the things that I already have. There are a few features that they have with actually merit some credit, and are also available on Windows.
Rocket Dock: The way that the Apple dock is implemented is kind of irritating to me. I really don’t like how an application remains open after I close the darn window. Combine that with the new transparent ‘glassy’ look in the new version, and I cannot easily look and see what is running because the fuzzball next to the application icon is too hard to identify. Minimizing open windows to the dock is also pretty lousy because the live view of the window is too small to make out the differences between windows. Everything looks like gray boarder with white background and some scribbles in the middle.
Ok, so, what is the Dock actually useful for? Getting icons off the desktop as an app launcher. I like to keep as clean desktop as possible. I do not autohide the taskbar, but I turn off the quick launch and minimize the amount of icons in the system tray to give as much space as possible to open windows on the taskbar. Previously, I would add icons on the desktop to launch to apps that I use most frequently, but they get in the way of the desktop background or the gadgets that I have running (more on that later). Today, I have moved those icons over to Rocket Dock which accomplishes the same role as app launching icons of the desktop.
Switcher2: Everyone that I have spoken to agrees that the Vista Flip 3D features is a gimmick and does not feel like it belongs in the desktop experience. It is also not very useful to task switching between windows because the view of each windows is partially obscured by the other windows and the tilt. The live previews added to the new alt tab (Windows Flip) helps, but its still too small and only useful with the keyboard. There is a trick to making the size of the previews bigger. But this is still not the best way, I need a way to view open windows that is good for both the keyboard and the mouse.
Apple’s operating system has a feature for task switching open windows called Exposé switch layout out open windows open screen with no overlap so the user does not have an obscured view on the contents within the window. The window that you want can be selected from a keyboard shortcut or by clicking on it with the mouse. The user can activate this feature either by pressing a pre-defined function key or moving the mouse to a corner of the screen, a feature called ‘hot corners’. I hate hot corners. On a big monitor, or multimon setup, I would need to move the mouse too far for the feature to be convenient, and since Apple has been waging a war against buttons, there are no mouse buttons to map the feature to.
Along comes a program called Switcher2, which provides similar functionality to Exposé. I have this program mapped on the keyboard to a shortcut, and on the mouse as the 5th mouse button for quick access without ever needing to touch the keyboard.
Two Finger Scroll: This program is my new found toy. Apple has a feature on their notebook PCs called touchpad gestures. Newer synaptics touchpads have support for gestures, but they are not turned on for Windows. The only one which I found actually has a decent utility is two finger scrolling, in which a user places two fingers on the touchpad anywhere and moves the fingers up and down to scroll up and down on an open program. Usually on windows there will be a section of the touchpad along the right edge for document scrolling, but I have found this to be imperfect since I want to use as much of the touchpad for pointing and selecting as possible. Accidentally activating the right edge scrolling is too frequent so I turn if when I can. But now, I find that I rarely activate two finger scrolling when I do not need mean it. The app is a little strange, since it is standalone with no installer, yet there is an option to launch the program when Windows starts. So when downloading and launching, it is advised to find a good place to keep the program.
