Old-style Mac OS X Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard | Hacker News Reader

Old-style Mac OS X Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard

ofbrooklyn.com

29 pointsconesus16 comments

I don't understand why they changed Exposé to proportional windows. It's not as easy to find what you're looking for--relative window size was the easiest way (for me) to quickly understand which window is which.

Agreed, they took literally the most immediately identifiable property of a window--its size--and threw it out in favor of a grid with text labels that I never read. The only justifications I can conceive of are that they wanted to give each window an equal click target, or that somebody really wanted text labels. Neither really impresses me. The old layout was a better visual metaphor too, akin to spreading out everything on a table; the animation for the new layout gives me a headache.

The Old-Style exposé ordered windows according to their size on the desktop and relative order in the stack, IIRC.

I've always assumed that when they decided to include minimized windows in exposé's results, they felt it was necessary to abandon those properties because it wasn't clear how minimized windows could be fit in with them.

Maybe they tried that internally but it didn't feel natural, or something.

The old expose has better keyboard support. Using the arrow keys I can almost always select the correct window with the first keydown.

Thanks for posting this.

Visually, I think the old-style of exposé makes window discovery much easier. I find myself using exposé with hot corners almost every time I switch windows. I'm going to be using the mouse later to test something in a browser window, so I might as well use it for the hot corners, too.

This is all kinds of awesome. The "old" exposé was The Right Way™ to do it.

Why would they have changed it if the new way weren't better?

In case you were serious, I would have you go down in flames trying to use that as a defense for all of the UX changes in Windows Vista. You have constructed a rhetorical question with no sane answer, kind of like the prosecutor asking the defendant, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" when he has never done such a thing.

> In case you were serious, I would have you go down in flames trying to use that as a defense for all of the UX changes in Windows Vista.

Either way, that statement was meant to apply to Apple alone (maybe you'll understand my subtle jab now).

I prefer the new-style Exposé, I find it more visually appealing. I'd never used it before Snow Leopard, but the changes made it much more appealing to me.

(Meta: I'm always interested why blatant copyright infringement of developer-only software (seen multiple times on HN) is upvoted -- or posted in the first place.)

It is more aesthetically pleasing, you're right. But I find it far less usable. Each window is small enough that I can't see the contents as easily, and it lost the cue of relative proportions which was the easiest way to spot things.

"Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade your Mac OS to a new patch release (10.6.5 -> 10.6.6)."

This is the first thing I do on any new Snow Leopard install. Not looking forward to it (likely) breaking permanently in Lion :/

unfortunately this kills the "minimize windows into dock icon" option :(

why can't I have my cake and eat it too?

You mean the yellow buttons don't work, or command M, or something else? I haven't tried this hack yet.

Edit: tried it, and those two things do work.

No, there's a way to make them go into the existing app icon, rather than in a series on the right side.

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