Tài liệu Exposé: Death to Window Clutter doc

5.3. Exposé: Death to Window Clutter

In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative,

and extremely effective. (Apple borrowed this idea from a research lab called Xerox

PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing your

windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them.

These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be

like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your

taskbar buttons (Windows) or the Dock (Mac OS X 10.5), trying to find the window you

want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly

downloaded file, for example, or eject a disk. You'll have to fight your way through

50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the "deck."

Exposé represents the first fresh look at this problem in decades. The concept is

delicious: With the press of the F9 key, Mac OS X shrinks all windows in all programs to

a size that fits on the screen (Figure 5-4), like index cards on a bulletin board. You click

the one you want, and you're there. It's fast, efficient, animated, and a lot of fun.

Note: On the superth in aluminum Apple keyboards, use the F3 key instead of F9. The

painful details are in the box below.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

A Tedious Sidebar about the Aluminum Apple Keyboards

Do you have the superthin aluminum Apple keyboard (the wireless one, or the

aluminum iMac one)? If so, the keystrokes described in this chapter don't not

work.

On that keyboard, the F9, F10, and F11 keys—the keys you need for Exposé—

are mapped to the Mac's speaker volume!

Fortunately, the most often used Exposé function, the one that exposes all open

windows at once, has its own special key on this keyboard: the F3 key.

So you're covered there: press F3 instead of F9. But what about the other two

Exposé functions, normally triggered by F10 and F11?

Method 1: Add the Control key (to Exposé one application's windows only) or